35.448, Calls: Traditions in the Study of Writing Worldwide

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-448. Thu Feb 08 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.448, Calls: Traditions in the Study of Writing Worldwide

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Date: 07-Feb-2024
From: Dimitrios Meletis [dimitrios.meletis at univie.ac.at]
Subject: Traditions in the Study of Writing Worldwide


Full Title: Traditions in the study of writing worldwide

Date: 26-Aug-2024 - 30-Aug-2024
Location: Tbilisi Ivane Javakhishvili State University, Georgia
Contact Person: Dimitrios Meletis
Meeting Email: dimitrios.meletis at univie.ac.at

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics; Writing Systems
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2024

Meeting Description:

Following influential work by the likes of Ferdinand de Saussure,
Hermann Paul, Leonard Bloomfield, and verdicts such as “[w]riting is
not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of
visible marks” (Bloomfield 1933: 21), linguistic research has
traditionally focused on spoken language, with the study of writing
existing largely at the discipline’s periphery. With the exception of
few efforts (such as Cram & Neis 2018), this is echoed by the fact
that while writing as a medium is acknowledged as an important driver
in the development of linguistics (see several chapters in Waugh,
Monville-Burston & Joseph 2023), research focusing on writing as a
system and subject in and of itself has remained a blind spot in
historiographic accounts of linguistics. Unsurprisingly, thus, a
“comprehensive history of grapholinguistics has yet to be written”
(Barbarić 2023: 124). To be truly comprehensive, such a history needs
to be comparative and thus inclusive of different scholarly
traditions. Thus far, the focus of the few historiographic accounts
has been firmly on Western, and predominantly English- and
German-language research (see, for example, the reconstructions in
Schlieben-Lange 1994; Spitzmüller 2013). Tracing the history of the
study of writing worldwide is admittedly challenging because relevant
research on writing as a multifaceted subject is scattered not only
across different disciplines – such as linguistics, anthropology, and
psychology – but also across different traditions within those
disciplines, traditions that have their own theoretical paradigms,
methods, and terminology and present and publish their research in
their specific contexts and – crucially – in their own languages. This
creates paradigmatic, methodological, and first and foremost
linguistic boundaries that remain, in many cases, uncrossed (see
Meletis 2021), resulting in unproductive situations in which different
traditions address the same questions (e.g., the relationship between
speech and writing or the definition of the grapheme) without
referring to one another.

This workshop aims to cross those boundaries by bringing together
scholars from different traditions in the study of writing to
reconstruct and gather diverse historical trends and perspectives
that, going forward, can inform and cross-fertilize each other,
resulting in a merging of different strands of grapholinguistics. To
achieve this, instead of talks focusing on specific phenomena of
writing or singular moments in the history of studying it, we invite
broader contributions that provide historiographic overviews of a
given tradition of the study of writing by highlighting its (1) most
important research questions, (2) central scholars, and (3) most
important literature. An example title for a talk would be “The
francophone tradition of studying writing”, in which an overview is
given of the history of French-language linguistic research on writing
(and not only work focusing on the French writing system, but also
writing and writing systems in general, cf. Catach 1997). Ideally, the
contributions will allow us to compile a program that gives as broad
an international picture of the history of grapholinguistics as
possible.

Call for Papers:

Please send an abstract consisting of around 400 words (note that
references are not included in this count) to
dimitrios.meletis[at]univie.ac.at. The submission deadline for
abstracts is March 1st, 2024, and notification of acceptance will be
sent by March 15th, 2024. To ensure mutual intelligibility, the
workshop will be held in English. Presentation slots will consist of a
20- to 25-minute talk followed by 5 to 10 minutes of questions and
discussion. A selection of papers will be part of a subsequent,
peer-reviewed publication. Please note that in the unlikely case that
more than one abstract is submitted for the same research tradition
(e.g., the Japanese-language study of writing), depending on the
degree of thematic overlap in the submitted abstracts, it is possible
that only one of them is accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

References
Barbarić, Vuk-Tadija. 2023. Grapholinguistics. In Marco Condorelli &
Hanna Rutkowska (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Historical
Orthography, 118–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart.
Catach, Nina. 1997. Les Histoires de l'Écriture: Panorama critique.
Histoire Épistémologie Langage 19.2: 177–185.
Cram, David & Cordula Neis (eds.). 2018. Writing Systems [Special
issue]. Language and History 61.1–2.
Meletis, Dimitrios. 2021. On being a grapholinguist. In Yannis
Haralambous (ed.), Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, Proceedings,
Part I, Paris, France, 2020, (= Grapholinguistics and Its
Applications; 4), 125–141. Brest: Fluxus Editions.
Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte. 1994. Geschichte der Reflexion über Schrift
und Schriftlichkeit. In Günther & Ludwig (eds.), 102–121.
Spitzmüller, Jürgen. 2013. Graphische Variation als soziale Praxis.
Eine soziolinguistische Theorie skripturaler ‚Sichtbarkeit‘ (=
Linguistik – Impulse & Tendenzen; 56). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Waugh, Linda R., Monique Monville-Burston & John E. Joseph (eds.).
2023. The Cambridge history of linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.



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