Dimitrios Meletis

University of Vienna | UniWien · Institut für Sprachwissenschaft

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...

Typographic mimicry is the wrapping of writing in a “foreign dress,” i.e. the use of typefaces in which one’s script (e.g. Latin) is made to visually resemble a different script (e.g. Chinese) with the goal of evoking associations with a “foreign” culture. First, this paper addresses the formal aspects of this practice, specifically the choice of v...

Writing is an eclectic phenomenon whose many facets are studied by the young interdisciplinary field of grapholinguistics. Linguistically, writing is a system of graphic marks that relate to language. Under the lens of processing, it is a method of producing and perceiving utterances with our hands, eyes, and brains. And from a communication theore...

The grapheme appears to be a central concept of grapholinguistics. However, there is no consensus on how it should be defined. Some use the concept of grapheme in their work but fail to give a definition while others altogether reject it. When the concept is defined, it is interpreted either as a written unit which refers to a phoneme (this is term...

The present article stands at the interface of CMC research and grapholinguistics. After outlining which features are typical of the writing of pri­ vate text messages, the focus of the first part of the paper (Sections 2 and 3) lies on the use of emojis. Notably, emoji use is not-as is commonly done-analyzed under a pragmatic perspective, but grap...

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...

In essence, typologies of writing systems seek to classify the world’s diverse writing systems in principled ways. However, against backdrops of early, misguided assumptions (Gelb 1969 [1952]) and stubborn term confusions, most proposals have focused primarily on the dominant levels of representational mapping (i. e., morphemic, syllabic, or phonem...

In this essay, I discuss the challenges of (engaging in) grapholinguistics, a young field that focuses on writing, a topic mostly marginalized within ‘mainstream’ linguistics to this day. Issues that are raised include the lack of writing-related classes in linguistic study programs, institutionalization (e.g., departments or chairs for grapholingu...

Variation in writing is highly frequent at both the visual and the functional levels. However, as of yet, the associated notion of allography has not been systematically described. In this article, two major types of allography are proposed: graphetic allography, conceptually comparable to allophony, depends on visual similarity and captures how co...

Naturalness Theory (NT) is founded on the notion of naturalness and claims that when a linguistic phenomenon can be processed by humans with little effort, both sensomotorically and cognitively, it is deemed more natural compared to other, more complex phenomena. Drawing on evidence such as language change, language acquisition, and language disord...