Português
Now, when I see two Chinese speakers augmenting their conversation by drawing characters in the air, I no longer sneer silently. For if Saussure, Sapir, Chomsky and Halle all appeal to alphabetic writing of one sort or another as having some privileged psychological status, then they too have been caught in the web of their own orthography.
David Aronoff (1992:81)
Our understanding of language has been influenced by writing since ancient times. Across the globe, traditions of linguistic inquiry almost invariably began from the study of writing rather than speech. This is not just true of the Graeco-Roman tradition, but also of Asia: Much like the English word ‘grammar’ derives from the Greek for ‘writing’ (grapho), modern East Asian words for this concept also derive from the Sino-xenic term for ‘the rules of writing’; whether it be the Mandarin wénfǎ 文法, the Japanese bunpō 文法, the Korean munbeop문법 or the Vietnamese văn pháp.
Although modern linguistics has shifted its priority toward spoken language, writing continues to influence our understanding of language. Some scholars go so far as to argue that sentence-, word- and phoneme-level segmentation is only possible because of writing (e.g. Arnoff 1992). If this is true, it follows that a great amount of modern linguistic concepts are directly derived from alphabetic writing (Meletis 2020:2). Yet the history of linguistic inquiry extends far beyond the realm of alphabetic – let alone phonetic – writing. This leads to the following questions: How might modern linguistics have been different if it had evolved from philological traditions based in a logographic writing, such as sinographs, (i.e. 漢字, ‘Chinese characters’)?
Historical grammatical studies on Chinese have led to the crystallization of the well-known tripartition of the parts of speech: ‘full’ (實), ‘empty’ (虚) and ‘auxiliary’ (助). The peculiarity of the Sinosphere is the fact that languages from completely different families have ended up adopting and readapting the Chinese-derived writing system (Handel 2019), carrying over assumptions about morphosyntax which often mismatched with local languages. This mismatch has, in turn, inspired new linguistic inquiries: For example, the indigenous Japanese linguistic tradition was historically focused on inflection, i.e. the parts of Japanese which were not easily rendered using sinographs (Mabuchi & Izumo 2007:55-62). This panel thus asks how sinographs have informed understandings of language and grammar in the historical Sinosphere (i.e. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and beyond): what concepts, analytical units and theoretical assumptions were conceived by scholars operating within the traditional Sinitic world, and how might they help us understand the relation between writing and linguistic theory in general?
We invite contributions on the history of the linguistic thought and grammatical analyses either developed within the historical Sinosphere or informed by the encounter with sinographs. We expect panels to investigate theories on language and grammar – in all their aspects – which were born out of contacts with Sinitic and the cross-border travels made by the sinograph. We encourage submissions on linguistic traditions that have received comparatively limited academic attention.
References:
Aronoff, Mark. 1992. “Segmentalism in linguistics: The alphabetic basis of phonological theory”. In: Pamela Downing, Susan D. Lima & Michael Noonan (eds.). The Linguistics of literacy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp .71-82
Handel, Zev. 2019. Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Mabuchi Kazuo & Izumo Asako. 2007. Kokugogakushi : Nihonjin no gengo kenkyū no rekishi. Tokyo: Kasama Shoin.
Meletis, Dimitrious. 2020. The Nature of Writing: A Theory of Grapholinguistics. Brest: Fluxus Editions.
David Aronoff (1992:81)
Our understanding of language has been influenced by writing since ancient times. Across the globe, traditions of linguistic inquiry almost invariably began from the study of writing rather than speech. This is not just true of the Graeco-Roman tradition, but also of Asia: Much like the English word ‘grammar’ derives from the Greek for ‘writing’ (grapho), modern East Asian words for this concept also derive from the Sino-xenic term for ‘the rules of writing’; whether it be the Mandarin wénfǎ 文法, the Japanese bunpō 文法, the Korean munbeop문법 or the Vietnamese văn pháp.
Although modern linguistics has shifted its priority toward spoken language, writing continues to influence our understanding of language. Some scholars go so far as to argue that sentence-, word- and phoneme-level segmentation is only possible because of writing (e.g. Arnoff 1992). If this is true, it follows that a great amount of modern linguistic concepts are directly derived from alphabetic writing (Meletis 2020:2). Yet the history of linguistic inquiry extends far beyond the realm of alphabetic – let alone phonetic – writing. This leads to the following questions: How might modern linguistics have been different if it had evolved from philological traditions based in a logographic writing, such as sinographs, (i.e. 漢字, ‘Chinese characters’)?
Historical grammatical studies on Chinese have led to the crystallization of the well-known tripartition of the parts of speech: ‘full’ (實), ‘empty’ (虚) and ‘auxiliary’ (助). The peculiarity of the Sinosphere is the fact that languages from completely different families have ended up adopting and readapting the Chinese-derived writing system (Handel 2019), carrying over assumptions about morphosyntax which often mismatched with local languages. This mismatch has, in turn, inspired new linguistic inquiries: For example, the indigenous Japanese linguistic tradition was historically focused on inflection, i.e. the parts of Japanese which were not easily rendered using sinographs (Mabuchi & Izumo 2007:55-62). This panel thus asks how sinographs have informed understandings of language and grammar in the historical Sinosphere (i.e. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and beyond): what concepts, analytical units and theoretical assumptions were conceived by scholars operating within the traditional Sinitic world, and how might they help us understand the relation between writing and linguistic theory in general?
We invite contributions on the history of the linguistic thought and grammatical analyses either developed within the historical Sinosphere or informed by the encounter with sinographs. We expect panels to investigate theories on language and grammar – in all their aspects – which were born out of contacts with Sinitic and the cross-border travels made by the sinograph. We encourage submissions on linguistic traditions that have received comparatively limited academic attention.
References:
Aronoff, Mark. 1992. “Segmentalism in linguistics: The alphabetic basis of phonological theory”. In: Pamela Downing, Susan D. Lima & Michael Noonan (eds.). The Linguistics of literacy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp .71-82
Handel, Zev. 2019. Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Mabuchi Kazuo & Izumo Asako. 2007. Kokugogakushi : Nihonjin no gengo kenkyū no rekishi. Tokyo: Kasama Shoin.
Meletis, Dimitrious. 2020. The Nature of Writing: A Theory of Grapholinguistics. Brest: Fluxus Editions.