Vdovichenko Andrey

The verbal process as reflected in reading and writing

Abstract

This article deals with practices of writing and reading, which demonstrate notable features of the natural verbal process. In comparison with “language”, communicative action — the main feature of natural speaking — appears to be a more effective theoretical frame for explaining the production of meaning, the source of which in verbal and nonverbal semiotic acts is individual consciousness. The widespread explanation of writing and reading allows too little space to the communicative production of meaning and too large to the correlation between the sound and a grapheme. Chinese hieroglyphs cannot be explained by such a simplistic model, as well as European phonological orthography. This article shows that between the Chinese and the Europeans there exists a fundamental similarity of writing and reading processes, which allows us to give a non-contradictory explanation of what happens in any case of the graphic recording of verbal (and non-verbal) data. Both the Chinese and the Europeans are able to write and read due to the aprioristic possession of communicative typology (including forms of oral communication), rather than due to the “exact and strict correlation between the sound and the written character”. “Signs” represent hints on already known forms of acts of communication, making these acts recognisable. Members of linguocultural communities do not speak with hieroglyphs or letters. By means of hieroglyphs or letters they only depict (force to retrieve from memory) the “corporal” part of communicative syntagmas. Due to this part, their initial cognitive integrity (the desired integrated act of communication) can be potentially recreated and then interpreted as a semiotic act. The alphabetic or hieroglyphic way of recording becomes a formality and comes down to a question of which of them is more effective and more convenient in certain conditions of communication. The separation of signs from a personal semiotic act (making them a special system, or “language”) disorients the theory of communication (including the verbal communication) because it depicts the communication process as a simplified scheme “sign-meaning”

Keywords

reading and writing, communicative action, language, semiotic act, letter, hieroglyph, Chinese and European reading or writing process, communicative typology

References

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Information about the author

Vdovichenko Andrey

Academic Degree: Doctor of sciences* in Philology;
Place of work: ведущий научный сотрудник, профессор;
ORCID: 0000-0003-4814-9042;
Email: an1vdo@mail.ru.

*According to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 2011, the degree of Candidate of Sciences (Cand.Sc.) belongs to ISCED level 8 — "doctoral or equivalent", together with PhD, DPhil, D.Lit, D.Sc, LL.D, Doctorate or similar.

Acknowledgments

The article is written within the framework of the project "The development of a communication model of a verbal process in the conditions of crisis of the language model" supported by RSF Foundation and The Institute of linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences