Writing Systems

Course Description

Writing systems relate graphic marks (e.g., the letters of Roman script or Chinese characters) with specific languages (e.g., English or Mandarin). They are tools of communication processed with our hands, eyes, and brains and socio-pragmatically adapted to serve a range of purposes in different everyday situations. To get a more complete picture of writing, we thus need to complement the structural perspective with use-oriented ones. Notably, writing also lends itself to the study of the Institute’s theme: On the one hand, remarkable universality is found in the few sound-based (= phonographic) and meaning-based (= morphographic) ways in which writing systems relate to language and in the cognitive processes involved in spelling and reading. On the other hand, the embeddedness of the world’s writing systems in culturally highly diverse linguistic communities is one (in this case sociolinguistic) factor resulting in great variation. Against this background, this course not only covers topics including the relationship between writing and speech, the structural description and typology of writing systems, the psycholinguistics of reading and writing, the instruction and acquisition of literacy, and sociolinguistic aspects of writing, but does so with a focus on what is universal vs. variable across writing systems – and why.

Area Tags: Spelling Systems, Literacy, Typology, Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics

Instructor: Dimitrios Meletis