The Social Semiotic Construction of Chemical Periodicity: A Multimodal View

Chemical periodicity is widely recognized as one fundamental idea in science
and much of the existing research attempts to discover one periodic table most
accurately depicting the natural order. This article adopts a multimodal perspective
on the periodic system by analyzing its historical evolution and the
constructed nature of periodic tables. The analysis indicates that chemical
periodicity
was culturally shaped as specialized functionalities for classifying
elements by their similar chemical behaviors. We argue that tabular representations
have powerful yet constrained modal affordances to interpret scientific
phenomena and that social semiotics provides a preliminary meta-language
for teaching and learning chemical periodicity.
Keywords: chemical periodicity; periodic table; multimodality; social semiotics;
grammar; modal affordances