Dimitrios Meletis – författare

Grapholinguistics, the multifaceted study of writing systems, is growing increasingly popular, yet to date no coherent account covering and connecting its major branches exists. This book now gives an overview of the core theoretical and empirical questions of this field. A treatment of the structure of writing systems—their relation to speech and language, their material features, linguistic functions, and norms, as well as the different types in which they come—is complemented by perspectives centring on the use of writing, incorporating psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic issues such as reading processes or orthographic variation as social action. Examples stem from a variety of diverse systems such as Chinese, English, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, German, and Korean, which allows defining concepts in a broadly applicable way and thereby constructing a comparative grapholinguistic framework that provides readers with important tools for studying any writing system. The book emphasizes that grapholinguistics is a discipline in its own right, inviting discussion and further research in this up-and-coming field as well as an overdue integration of writing into general linguistic discussion.

This handbook gives a comprehensive overview of the writing systems of the Germanic languages. Divided into four parts, its chapters cover a wide range of aspects, bridging different disciplines and their theories, perspectives, and methods – from linguistics to psychology and sociology.Part I provides synchronic grapholinguistic analyses of the alphabets in use for different Germanic languages, focusing not only on their inner systematics but also their relationships with the spoken and signed modalities. Part II traces the history of the different branches of Germanic literacy and underlines the relevance of a diachronic foundation. Part III addresses vital psycholinguistic questions including literacy instruction and acquisition and the processes involved in healthy and impaired spelling and reading. Part IV adopts sociolinguistic perspectives and touches upon different issues arising from the fact that literacy is embedded in specific cultural contexts. Its chapters underline the paramount societal and political dimensions of writing.