Language as Relational Technology: 6 Relational Technology Across Modalities

In the preceding posts, we have traced meaning from construal through system networks, histories of use, semiotic experimentation, and the differentiation of possibility. We now extend the lens beyond verbal language to show that this architecture is not unique to words alone.

Multimodal Semiotics

Gesture, image, music, and even digital communication platforms instantiate semiotic potential in ways analogous to verbal language. Each modality exhibits:

• a system of structured distinctions,

• probabilistic pathways of actualisation,

• sedimentation of recurrent patterns over histories of use,

• room for semiotic experimentation that produces novelty.

Consider the way a musical motif can recur and vary across a composition. Its recognisability arises not from pre-existing thought in the composer’s mind, but from repeated instantiations within the musical system and its cultural sedimentation. Similarly, in social media, the spread of memes, reactions, and emergent conventions follows probabilistic pathways and histories of use rather than interior cognition.

Coordination Across Modalities

Alignment in multimodal communication operates on the same principles as verbal coordination:

• participants rely on sedimented patterns and probabilistic expectations,

• novel distinctions are interpreted relative to familiar semiotic pathways,

• successful coordination emerges relationally, through interaction with semiotic potential, not through interior knowledge.

By observing coordination, recurrence, and innovation across modalities, analysts can see the same semiotic architecture at work, revealing the generality of relational technology.

Implications for Cross-Disciplinary Application

This perspective opens the door to comparative and cross-disciplinary work:

• Ethnomusicologists can trace semiotic sedimentation in musical traditions.

• Media scholars can examine probabilistic coordination in visual and digital forms.

• Gesture studies can model the probabilistic pathways of recurrent movement distinctions.

In every case, the relational, system-based approach provides a unified framework for understanding how semiotic potential is actualised, stabilised, and innovated, independent of the modality.

Preparing for Synthesis

By demonstrating the generality of relational technology across modalities, we set the stage for the final post in this series: a synthesis that articulates Language as Relational Technology in its full conceptual and applied scope. That post will draw together all six threads, making explicit the methodological, analytical, and philosophical implications for understanding language and meaning as relational, systemic, and historically situated.