Graphemics

Graphemics or graphematics is the linguistic study of writing systems and their basic components, i.e. graphemes.

At the beginning of the development of this area of linguistics, Ignace Gelb coined the term grammatology for this discipline;[1] later some scholars suggested calling it graphology[2] to match phonology, but that name is traditionally used for a pseudo-science. Others therefore suggested renaming the study of language-dependent pronunciation phonemics or phonematics instead, but this did not gain widespread acceptance either, so the terms graphemics and graphematics became more frequent.

Graphemics examines the specifics of written texts in a certain language and their correspondence to the spoken language. One major task is the descriptive analysis of implicit regularities in written words and texts (graphotactics) to formulate explicit rules (orthography) for the writing system that can be used in prescriptive education or in computer linguistics, e.g. for speech synthesis.

In analogy to phoneme and (allo)phone in phonology, the graphic units of language are graphemes, i.e. language-specific characters, and graphs, i.e. language-specific glyphs. Different schools of thought consider different entities to be graphemes; major points of divergence are the handling of punctuation, diacritic marks, digraphs or other multigraphs and non-alphabetic scripts.

Analogous to phonetics, the "etic" counterpart of graphemics is called graphetics and deals with the material side only (including paleography, typography and graphology).

Grammatology

The term 'grammatology was first promoted in English by linguist Ignace Gelb in his 1952 book A Study of Writing.[1] The equivalent word is recorded in German and French use long before then.[3][4] Grammatology can examine the typology of scripts, the analysis of the structural properties of scripts, and the relationship between written and spoken language.[5] In its broadest sense, some scholars also include the study of literacy in grammatology and, indeed, the impact of writing on philosophy, religion, science, administration and other aspects of the organization of society.[6] Historian Bruce Trigger associates grammatology with cultural evolution.[7]

Graphotactics

Graphotactics refers to rules which restrict the allowable sequences of letters in alphabetic languages.[8]: 67  A common example is the partially correct "I before E except after C". However, there are exceptions, for example Edward Carney in his book, A Survey of English Spelling, refers to the "I before E except after C” rule instead as an example of a “phonotactic rule”.[8]: 161  Graphotactical rules are useful in error detection by optical character recognition systems.[9]

In studies of Old English, "graphotactics" is also used to refer to the variable-length spacing between words.[10]

Toronto School of communication theory

Main article: Toronto School of communication theory

The scholars most immediately associated with grammatology, understood as the history and theory of writing, include Eric Havelock (The Muse Learns to Write), Walter J. Ong (Orality and Literacy), Jack Goody (Domestication of the Savage Mind), and Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy). Grammatology brings to any topic a consideration of the contribution of technology and the material and social apparatus of language. A more theoretical treatment of the approach may be seen in the works of Friedrich Kittler (Discourse Networks: 1800/1900) and Avital Ronell (The Telephone Book).

Structuralism and Deconstruction

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who is considered to be a key figure in structural approaches to language,[11] saw speech and writing as 'two distinct systems of signs' with the second having 'the sole purpose of representing the first.',[12] a view further explained in Peter Barry's the Beginning Theory. In the 1960s, with the writings Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, critiques have been put forth to this proposed relation.

In 1967, Jacques Derrida borrowed the term, but put it to different use, in his book Of Grammatology. Derrida aimed to show that writing is not simply a reproduction of speech, but that the way in which thoughts are recorded in writing strongly affects the nature of knowledge. Deconstruction from a grammatological perspective places the history of philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular, in the context of writing as such. In this perspective metaphysics is understood as a category or classification system relative to the invention of alphabetic writing and its institutionalization in School. Plato's Academy, and Aristotle's Lyceum, are as much a part of the invention of literacy as is the introduction of the vowel to create the Classical Greek alphabet. Gregory Ulmer took up this trajectory, from historical to philosophical grammatology, to add applied grammatology (Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys, Johns Hopkins, 1985). Ulmer coined the term "electracy" to call attention to the fact that digital technologies and their elaboration in new media forms are part of an apparatus that is to these inventions what literacy is to alphabetic and print technologies.

See also

• Graphocentrism – Focus on written language as "best" language
• Graphonomics – Study of handwriting and drawing
• Deconstruction – Approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning
• List of writing systems
• Of Grammatology – 1967 book by Jacques Derrida
• Post-structuralism – Philosophical school and tradition
• Structuralism – Theory of culture and methodology
• Writing system – Convention of symbols representing language
• Written language – Representation of a language through writing

References

1. Gelb, Ignace. 1952. A Study of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
2. Used in this sense e.g. in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
3. J C Chasse (1792). Versuch eiener griechischen und lateinischen Grammatologie. Königsberg. OCLC 67778627.
4. Francis Massé (1863). Grammatologie Française: A series of 50 examination papers. London. OCLC 56705532.
5. Daniels, Peter T. 1996. The study of writing systems. In Daniels, Peter T. and Bright, William, eds., The World's Writing Systems, pp. 1-17. New York: Oxford University Press
6. Marc Wilhelm Küster: "Geordnetes Weltbild. Die Tradition des alphabetischen Sortierens von der Keilschrift bis zur EDV. Eine Kulturgeschichte". Niemeyer: Tübingen, 2006/2007,p. 19f
7. Trigger, Bruce G. (2004-12-09) [1998]. "Writing systems: a case study in cultural evolution". In Houston, Stephen D. (ed.). The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge University Press (published 2004). pp. 39–40. ISBN 9780521838610. Retrieved 2015-03-10. Grammatology, the study of writing systems, offers a useful way to evaluate evolutionary approaches to understanding change in cultural phenomena. [...] Writing has been associated with evolutionary theorizing since the eighteenth century.
8. Carney, Edward. A Survey of English Spelling at Google Books
9. Nylander, Stina (14 January 2000). "Statistics and Graphotactical Rules in Finding OCR-errors". Language Engineering Programme, Department of Linguistics. Uppsala University. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.140.9712.
10. Stevick, Robert. "Graphotactics of the Old English 'Alexander's Letter to Aristotle'". University of Washington: The Free Library. Retrieved 22 October 2012.
11. Barry, P., 1995, Beginning Theory – An introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Manchester University Press, Manchester
12. Derrida, J., 1976, Of Grammatology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore