5 - Theoretical Approaches to Understanding Writing Systems

Summary

This chapter offers an overview of selected linguistic approaches to writing and writing systems, mainly to alphabetic orthographies, with special emphasis on the English language. The survey starts with the ancient views on the relationship between speech and writing, as they constitute the foundation of premodern and modern perspectives. Since the debate between the relational and autonomistic approaches took several decades in the twentieth century, an important part of the chapter covers their main tenets and representatives. The author argues that, over time, one can observe growing convergence between the previously opposite perspectives, which testifies to the increase in the awareness of the complexity of interrelations between alphabetic writing systems and the other language subsystems. Eventually, scholars, especially those focusing on English in their research, have widened their interest in writing systems to a variety of extralinguistic aspects interrelated with the patterns of orthographic variation. These interrelations are presented and illustrated in the last part of the chapter, which is devoted to the historical sociolinguistic approach.