{{Short description|Study of graphemes and writing systems}} {{Linguistics}} '''Grapholinguistics'''<ref>{{Cite book |last=Meletis |first=Dimitrios |url=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110757835/html |title=Writing Systems and Their Use: An Overview of Grapholinguistics |last2=Dürscheid |first2=Christa |date=2022-06-20 |publisher=De Gruyter |isbn=978-3-11-075783-5 |doi=10.1515/9783110757835}}</ref><ref name=":0">{{Citation |last=Barbarić |first=Vuk-Tadija |title=Grapholinguistics |date=2023 |work=The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Orthography |pages=118–137 |editor-last=Rutkowska |editor-first=Hanna |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-historical-orthography/grapholinguistics/7B2994673DEACCB78A8935A41B846BAB |access-date=2026-04-27 |series=Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics |place=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/9781108766463.006 |isbn=978-1-108-48731-3 |editor2-last=Condorelli |editor2-first=Marco|url-access=subscription }}</ref> is a branch of linguistics that concerns writing systems, their basic components (i.e. graphemes and graphs) and the rules that define them.
Graphology examines the specifics of written texts in a certain language and their correspondence to the spoken language. One area is the descriptive analysis of implicit regularities in written words and texts (''graphotactics'', analogous to phonotactics) 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.
Study of the graphic units of language is divided into two branches, analogous to the handling of phonemes and phones in phonology and phonetics (the ''emic'' and ''etic'' areas of research). These are ''graphematics'' (sometimes ''graphemics''), which studies systems of graphemes, and ''graphetics'', which studies the distribution and form of graphs (e.g. through typography or elements of palaeography).<ref name=":0" /> 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.
==Name== At the beginning of the development of this area of linguistics, Ignace Gelb coined the term '''''grammatology''''' for this discipline;<ref name="Gelb1952">Gelb, Ignace. 1952. ''A Study of Writing''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press</ref> later some scholars suggested calling it ''graphology''<ref>Used in this sense e.g. in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1997.</ref> 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.{{Citation needed|date=April 2026}} More recently, the term ''grapholinguistics'' has been used in English to imply a larger subfield of linguistics and allow contrast between ''graphematics'' and g''raphetics'' (though it had previously existed in the German tradition as ''Schriftlinguistik'').<ref name=":0" />
=== Grammatology === The term ''grammatology'' was first promoted in English by linguist Ignace Gelb in his 1952 book ''A Study of Writing''.<ref name="Gelb1952" /> The equivalent word is recorded in German and French use long before then.<ref>{{cite book |author=J C Chasse |location= Königsberg | date=1792 |title=Versuch eiener griechischen und lateinischen Grammatologie |oclc=67778627}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Francis Massé |title=Grammatologie Française: A series of 50 examination papers |location=London |date=1863 |oclc= 56705532 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lpsFAAAAQAAJ }}</ref> Grammatology examines the typology of scripts, the analysis of the structural properties of scripts, and the relationship between written and spoken language.<ref>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</ref> 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.<ref>Marc Wilhelm Küster: "Geordnetes Weltbild. Die Tradition des alphabetischen Sortierens von der Keilschrift bis zur EDV. Eine Kulturgeschichte". Niemeyer: Tübingen, 2006/2007,p. 19f</ref> Historian Bruce Trigger associates grammatology with cultural evolution.<ref>{{cite book| last1= Trigger| first1= Bruce G.| author-link1= Bruce Trigger| orig-date= 1998| chapter= Writing systems: a case study in cultural evolution| editor1-last= Houston| editor1-first= Stephen D.| editor1-link= Stephen D. Houston| title= The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process| url= https://books.google.com/books?id=jsWL_XJt-dMC| publisher= Cambridge University Press| publication-date= 2004| pages= 39–40| isbn= 9780521838610| accessdate= 2015-03-10| quote= 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.| date= 2004-12-09}}</ref>
==Subfields==
=== Graphematics === '''''Graphematics''''' (or '''''graphemics''''') refers to the study of the systems that organise graphemes, which are realized as graphs, and their relation to phonology.<ref>{{Citation |last=Meletis |first=Dimitrios |title=4 Graphematics |date=2022-06-21 |work=Writing Systems and Their Use: An Overview of Grapholinguistics |page=115 |url=https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110757835-004/html?lang=en |access-date=2026-04-27 |publisher=De Gruyter Mouton |language=en |doi=10.1515/9783110757835-004 |isbn=978-3-11-075783-5 |last2=Dürscheid |first2=Christa|doi-access=free }}</ref>
=== Graphetics === '''''Graphetics''''' refers to the study of the physical properties of the glyphs used in writing, and is analogous to the study of the physical properties of phones in phonetics.<ref>{{Citation |last=Meletis |first=Dimitrios |title=3 Graphetics |date=2022-06-21 |work=Writing Systems and Their Use: An Overview of Grapholinguistics |page=56 |url=https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110757835-003/html?lang=en |access-date=2026-04-27 |publisher=De Gruyter Mouton |language=en |doi=10.1515/9783110757835-003 |isbn=978-3-11-075783-5 |last2=Dürscheid |first2=Christa|doi-access=free }}</ref>
=== Graphotactics === '''''Graphotactics''''' refers to rules which restrict the allowable sequences of letters in alphabetic languages.<ref name=Carney>Carney, Edward. {{Google books|sceZ5XcqSfIC|A Survey of English Spelling}}</ref>{{rp|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".<ref name=Carney/>{{rp|161}} Graphotactical rules are useful in error detection by optical character recognition systems.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Nylander|first=Stina|title=Statistics and Graphotactical Rules in Finding OCR-errors|citeseerx = 10.1.1.140.9712|journal=Language Engineering Programme, Department of Linguistics|publisher=Uppsala University|access-date=<!-- 22 October 2012 -->|date=14 January 2000}}</ref>
In studies of Old English, ''graphotactics'' is also used to refer to the variable-length spacing between words.<ref>{{cite web|last=Stevick|first=Robert|title=Graphotactics of the Old English 'Alexander's Letter to Aristotle' |url=http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Graphotactics+of+the+Old+English+'Alexander's+Letter+to+Aristotle'.-a0125953277|publisher=The Free Library|access-date=22 October 2012|location=University of Washington}}</ref>
== Toronto School of communication theory == {{main|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,<ref>Barry, P., 1995, ''Beginning Theory – An introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory'', Manchester University Press, Manchester</ref> saw speech and writing as 'two distinct systems of signs' with the second having 'the sole purpose of representing the first.',<ref>Derrida, J., 1976, ''Of Grammatology'', The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore</ref> 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 == * {{Annotated link |Graphocentrism}} * {{Annotated link |Graphonomics}} * {{Annotated link |Deconstruction}} * {{Annotated link |List of writing systems}} * {{Annotated link |Of Grammatology|''Of Grammatology''}} * {{Annotated link |Post-structuralism}} * {{Annotated link |Structuralism}} * {{Annotated link |Writing system}} * {{Annotated link |Written language}}
==References== {{Reflist}}
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Category:Grammatology