possibilities for putting things first or last, or somewhere else in a sequence. The
mode of speech is governed by the logic of time. (Still) images are governed by the
logic of space and simultaneity. A sign-maker has to display what they wish to show
in the space available for their representation, be it the page or the screen. All of the
elements that they wish to display have to be simultaneously present, and their
relations in meaning have to be spatially indicated: close to or far away, below or
above, centrally or marginal. Modal affordances are used differently in different
communities of practices, they have come to be shaped differently through their
social use in specific communities of practices. The resource of modes and their
affordances has led to the functional specialisation of modes.
Functional Specialisation
Functional specialisation of modes is a feature of multimodal representation: it is an
effect both of the affordances of modes (i.e. this mode is can more easily represent
something than another mode can), and of design decisions in relation to the
audience. Such design decisions include the effect of power, as when the elite make a
mode into the preferred resource as has been the case with the mode of writing. The
specialisation of modes refers to the long-term effect of cultural valuation: if a culture
values a mode highly, much work will inevitably go into its elaboration, through its
constant use by members of a social group. Its constant use in relation to specific
purposes will make modes come to be specialised for representing and
communicating particular meanings in particular social contexts. As a result not
every mode will be equally ‘useable’ for a particular task:
It is possible to envisage the whole field of everything that can be
'meant' in a given sociocultural domain at a given moment of its
development (which, in my view, is not со-extensive with the
semantics of language) and then to also envisage how that
sociocultural domain will have a certain distribution of different
semiotic modes across that field, in such a way that some things can
be signified visually as well as verbally, others only visually, others
only verbally, others both verbally and musically but not visually, and
so on.
(van Leeuwen, 2000: 181-2)
42