For over a century, language has been considered as an amodal and arbitrary system with a primary modality of speech. Yet, as argued in our book A Multimodal Language Faculty (Cohn & Schilperoord 2024), this conception of language cannot account for many of the basic observations revealed in the past decades of language research, particularly the growing recognition of the importance of multimodality. I will present a multimodal model of language that accounts for all unimodal behaviors across the vocal, bodily, and graphic modalities along with their multimodal combinations. This “grand unified” model directly allows for semiotic promiscuity across iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, while warranting new understandings of linguistic innateness, relativity, universals, and evolution. Altogether, this approach heralds a shift to a Multimodal Paradigm of the language sciences, re-imagining both its cognitive faculty and the notion of “language” itself.
