Page 162 - Literacy in the New Media Age

READING AS SEMIOSIS 151

extent organised on the principles of the syntax (and texture) of speech. This
becomes apparent whenever we have read into a sentence, or into a text, and find
that we have given it an intonational shape which becomes unsustainable, in the
sense that it leads to no sense semantically (and syntactically).
Transducing writing back into speech, in the process of reading, takes the
reader back to the semiotic logic of speech, which itself derives from the
materiality of sound. Human speech-sounds have to be uttered one at a time, so
that the logic of temporality and temporal sequence provide the deep ordering
principle for speech. One sound has to be uttered after another, one lexical
element after another, one clause after another, and so on. Of course, even in
speech, simple succession can be modified, both lexically (with conjunctions of
various kinds – because, so that, therefore, nevertheless) and textually/
syntactically (with various forms of syntactic subordination). But even without
the transduction of writing back to speech, the logic of speech – of temporality –
remains in writing, even if it is made less immediately apparent, especially in
‘formal’ writing, by the syntactic means available. This means that whereas in
speech sequence (as parataxis) is dominant, in writing hierarchy (as hypotaxis)
dominates, whether we are looking at the (size) levels of phonology/graphology,
of morphology, of syntax or of text.
Not all alphabetic script systems insist on the same close relation to sound as
do the cultures using the ‘Western’ (roman, cyrillic) versions: in Arabic and
Hebrew versions of the alphabet only consonants are represented, and vowels, if
marked at all, are present as super- or subscripts attached to consonants. In other
words, not all sounds are transliterated. Nevertheless, for alphabetic systems it
seems to be true to say that language is at the first step represented as being
about sound (and only at a second step as being about meaning), by contrast with
ideographic script systems, where language seems to be represented at the first
step as being about meaning, and at a second step as being about sound. It is
worth pointing out that the sound–letter relation does not exist for the
communities of the speech-impaired, who are nevertheless able to ‘read’ script
or writing even though they have never heard the sound of speech. In a different
way, the letter-as-image relation is broken for the blind, for whom reading means
‘feeling writing’.

The world as shown: reading as design
It is when we turn to texts produced with letter and image that further distinctive
features of writing with letters appear. This may be best shown by focusing on the
logic of image, to contrast with the logic of (writing and) speech. As I have
suggested, the logic of speech – and by extension of writing – is that of time and
sequence, and the logic of image is that of space, and of simultaneity. Figure 9.6
shows the contrasting characteristics of the two logics.
This example comes from a class of 6-year-olds who visited the British
Museum in London. On the day after the visit, the teacher asked the class to draw