ABSTRACT
What if we assumed seriously that meaning-in the fullest sense-is made in modes other than speech and writing? Of course, it will be said immediately: “But we all do, we have always taken that into consideration.” We know the work done in psychology on nonverbal communication, whether in its focus on gesture, on gaze, or in its studies of the diff erential eff ects of the use of word rather than image on comprehension or recall for instance (Argyle, 1990; Paivio, 1971). We know that art historians (Gombrich, 1960; Arnheim, 1972, 1974) have always dealt with the meaning of images, and we know that there are whole subdisciplines devoted to image, whether as visual culture or as the sociology of the image (van Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001; Rose, 2001; Becker, 1981; Chaplin,1994). Even in mainstream linguistics the nonverbal, the extralinguistic or paralinguistic are acknowledged, even if in passing.
