ABSTRACT
Gunther Kress has long argued (1989, 1997, 2003, 2010b) that people actively make the signs they use. They do not just recover them from a passive store in their heads. We humans are active designers. Very young children, as Kress (1997) has shown, actively invent signs that are “apt” for their purposes (e.g., a child making a circular drawing motion to “signal” a wheel or using a word like “goed”). But, as I read him, Kress also argues that proficient users of language and images also create signs apt for their purposes on the spot and at the moment of communication in specific contexts.
