Novel Perspectives on Communication Practices in Antiquity: Towards a Historical Social-Semiotic Approach, Ghent University, October 3–5, 2019
The main aim of this conference, which forms the opening event of the ERC-project ‘Everyday writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt. A socio-semiotic study of communicative variation’ (2018–2023), is to explore to what extent it is possible and desirable to found a discipline such as historical social-semiotics, parallel to historical socio-linguistics. Such a novel, interdisciplinary approach is particularly relevant for ‘everyday’ documentary texts: since these texts represent autographs, their external characteristics can also be brought into the interpretation. Jean-Luc Fournet (2007), for example, has recently argued for a ‘paléographie signifiante’, noting that ‘l’analyse matérielle d’un document peut être porteuse de sens’, not only when it comes to text type, but also with regard to the socio-cultural context of writing, and the provenance of the document. Other external characteristics to be considered as expressions of social meaning (functioning as ‘semiotic resources’) are – but are not limited to – writing material, document format, and language choice. Their analysis reveals information concerning hierarchy, status and social relations.
The main focus of the conference will be documentary texts from the Mediterranean region, roughly spanning the period from the first millennium BCE to the first millennium CE. Next to the study of specific (linguistic, palaeographic, material, etc.) features, we consider the following questions to be of particular relevance:
- Which ‘semiotic resources’ should be taken into account when studying Ancient texts?
- How are these different semiotic resources interrelated?
- Can certain semiotic resources express types of meaning which other resources cannot?
- Which types of social meaning are expressed through communicative variation?
- How are these different types of social meaning related to each other?
- Is it possible to identify larger patterns of co-occurrence, extending linguistic concepts such as ‘register’ and ‘genre’ to other domains?
- Which diachronic changes can be observed?
- How do ‘everyday’ texts from Egypt compare to texts found elsewhere?
- Which digital tools are required for the discipline of historical social-semiotics?
- Which theoretical concepts from social semiotics can be further developed?
- What role do scribes play for the social-semiotic analysis of ancient texts?
- What kind of standards were there for ‘everyday’ communication practices?