The Social Semiotic Construction of Chemical Periodicity: A Multimodal View

摘要

Chemical periodicity is widely recognized as one fundamental idea in scienceudand much of the existing research attempts to discover one periodic table mostudaccurately depicting the natural order. This article adopts a multimodal perspectiveudon the periodic system by analyzing its historical evolution and theudconstructed nature of periodic tables. The analysis indicates that chemicaludperiodicityudwas culturally shaped as specialized functionalities for classifyingudelements by their similar chemical behaviors. We argue that tabular representationsudhave powerful yet constrained modal affordances to interpret scientificudphenomena and that social semiotics provides a preliminary meta-languageudfor teaching and learning chemical periodicity.udKeywords: chemical periodicity; periodic table; multimodality; social semiotics;udgrammar; modal affordances