Autonomy of Writing and the Interdependence with Speech

In this chapter, I further discuss the widespread perception of the “de­

pendence” and “secondary nature” of writing that was shown previously, as well as the description of their relationship as a dichotomy.

Even if writing has a primacy role in contemporary society’s commu­

nication, the research on written language has encountered many obsta­

cles. Firstly, the phonocentric approach in linguistics greatly delayed the study of writing as an autonomous entity in its own right rather than oral dependent (cf. Berg, 2016). This delay affected not only lin­

guistic research but also that of other social science disciplines. In fact, at least until the middle of the twentieth century, written language was the exclusive domain of linguists, whereas anthropologists were sup­

posed to deal exclusively with “primitive” peoples. As this ethnocen­

tric and early evolutionist term suggests, the populations studied in an­

thropological research at that time did not have this graphical­cultural invention—otherwise, they could never have been classified as people with “less advanced cultures”—and thus could not have been studied by ethno­anthropologists.

Writing can be defined as the human use of a graphic sign system with a symbolic value. A graphic sign itself cannot yet be considered as a form of writing since it must be included in a larger system of graphic oppositions (Cardona, 2009). The minimum unit of writing is the grapheme, which is preferred to the alphabetic­centric term letter, through which a set of signs forms a graphematic system (Hořejší, 1971).⁷It seems impossible to

6. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, attempts were made in Europe to establish complete control of the spoken language through writing. As previously mentioned, one of the most representative examples concerns the early linguistic studies of the Neo­Grammarian period of the nineteenth century, when the phonemes of the Indo­European and Semitic languages were exclusively studied and compared in relation to corresponding graphemes.

7. Hořejší wished to go beyond the distinction between grapheme and phoneme and proposed a unit having these two correspondences: thegraphophoneme. As he wrote, “In our opinion, the two kinds of ‘one­way’ correspondences should be replaced by a single mutual or ‘two­way’ correspondence, and the unitsphonemeandgrapheme

establish a parallelism between the phonemic unit and the spelling unit since the former does not constitute a sign, whereas the grapheme does have a signified and a signifier. The relationship between the grapheme and the phoneme is accurately summarized in the scheme elaborated by Rosiello (1966) and reported in Fig. 1.

meaning

PHONEME form = phonemic constrast

substance = sound = meaning

graphemic constrast = form GRAPHEME ink, pixel = substance

Fıgure 1. Relationship between grapheme and phoneme in a language with an alphabetical system (Rosiello, 1966)

A phoneme communicates with a grapheme solely through its mean­

ing. Instead, the form and substance of the writing minimal unit keep a complete autonomy from the phonological one.

One of the first researchers who defined the minimum unit of writ­

ing was Josef Vachek, one of the Prague School linguists. In 1939, he took over the research of the Russian Agenor Artymovič on the auton­

omy of writing from spoken language. Vachek insisted both on their independent nature and on their coexistence within the same language (Ineichen, 1971) while demonstrating that they differ in their linguis­

tic function. The functionalist approach repeatedly developed by the Czechoslovak linguist can be summarised as follows:

The spoken norm of language is a system of phonically manifestable lan­

guage elements whose function is to react to a given stimulus (which, as a rule, is an urgent one) in a dynamic way, i.e., in a ready and immediate man­

ner, duly expressing not only the purely communicative but also the emo­

tional aspect of the approach of the reacting language user. The written norm of language is a system of graphically manifestable language elements whose function is to react to a given stimulus (which, as a rule, is not an urgent one) in a static way, i.e., in a preservable and easily surveyable manner, concen­

trating particularly on the purely communicative aspect of the approach of the reacting language user. (Vachek, 1973, pp. 15–16)

In 1944, the Danish linguist Hans J. Uldall considered them to be

“only two realizations out of an infinite number of possible systems, of

by units each containing the pair of a phoneme or group of phonemes and a grapheme that correspond to each other. We propose to name such unitsgraphophonemes”. (Hoře­

jší, 1971, p. 189)

which no one can be said to be more fundamental than any other” (1944, p. 16). Speech and writing simply coexist and they are mutually non­

congruent, expressing the same language, simply transmitted by two different substances such as pulmonary airflow on one side and ink on the other. Lev Vygotskij (1962) added that written language, as a lin­

guistic function in its own right, differs from spoken language not only in its structure but also in the way it functions. A few years later, the classification developed by Ernst Pulgram (1951) on the structural char­

acteristics of the phoneme and grapheme also showed that the only com­

mon element between them is that both are conventional sign systems, one of them having as meaning concepts and the other simple sounds.

The differences between spoken and written language empha­

sized by the aforementioned linguists clearly distance themselves from the common Saussurian view—supported by most linguists in recent decades as mentioned before—that writing is simply language made vis­

ible. Unfortunately, in the following years, Vachek and Pulgram were unable to strengthen and expand their theses on the autonomy of writ­

ten language. Their intuition thus fell partly into oblivion, but in recent years it has been taken up again in neuropsychological research, has de­

finitively opposed the dominant conception according to which written production postulates the existence of compulsory phonological medi­

ation (Geschwind, 1969; Luria, 1970). In fact, more recent studies in neuropsychology have demonstrated a relative autonomy of writing in relation to speech and by examining the cognitive processes involved in the production of these two types of communication (Bonin, Fayol, and Peereman, 1998; Bonin, Pacton, and Fayol, 2001; Rapp, Benzing, and Caramazza, 1997; Rapp and Caramazza, 1997). These recent stud­

ies of psycholinguistics found that writing is not cognitively secondary to speech: during a mother tongue learning process, the writing system does not mechanically reproduce the cognitive path already traced by the phonemic system learned in earlier years. Thus, the writing sys­

tem acquisition has a certain autonomy and creates original procedures capable of modifying oral cognitive structures. To summarize, the com­

mon conception of the secondarity of the writing system with respect to the phonemic system and of non­autonomy seems unreliable, even erroneous. Indeed, this view can only be taken into consideration to describe the process of learning the mother tongue at the beginning of a child’s life (Ineichen, 1971)⁸ but is not appropriate for the second lan­

guage acquisition, a process during which learners often receive oral and written input at the same time.

8. Individuals from all human cultures learn to speak in the early stages of their growth, whereas in order to write they must wait for a considerably more advanced stage of mental development.

Furthermore, their relationship should no longer be thought of as a dichotomy, but rather as Halliday (1985), Chafe and Danielewicz (1987), and other more recent linguists suggested: as two modalities of the same language, as two poles of an intertwined multi­dimensional continuum (cf. Koch and Oesterreicher, 2012).

In 1985, Halliday noticed that with the technology of the twentieth and twenty­first centuries, there is no longer value in obsessively look­

ing for a dichotomy between speech and writing, and it is illogical to put one manifestation of language before another. Conversely, they should be considered as manifestations of the language system itself. As Koch and Oesterreicher (ibid.) pointed out, the relationship between the phonic and graphic code can be defined as a dichotomy, whereas speech and writing are two concepts which stand in a continuum of infinite language possibilities, depending on several parameters such as social relationship, number, and space­time position of the partners, theme, socio­cultural context, etc.⁹