To study communicative variation in antiquity, we have developed a new digital database designed to annotate everyday documents for both their socio-pragmatic background and communicative characteristics. This includes factors such as the social status of the initiator and receiver, the hierarchical nature of their relationship, and the communicative goals of the initiator. Additionally, our project goes beyond language to incorporate visual and material elements like format, layout, and handwriting, as well as orthography and language choice, which bridge the linguistic and visual domains.
Rather than attempting to annotate the entire papyrological corpus of approximately 60,000 texts, our project focuses on a 'focus corpus' of around 4,600 texts, which have been annotated for their socio-pragmatic background. The results of this annotation work will become publicly accessible through a dedicated project website, the 'Everyday Writing' website. Additionally, the 'Everyday Writing Data Exploration Tool' allows users to generate quantitative overviews based on our annotations.
The project has made significant progress in two major areas. The first is the analysis of meaning-making features within separate semiotic modes such as language, multilingualism, materiality, and typography. For example, various studies have appeared that outline how people combined clauses and sentences to create text, both with regard to subordination strategies (e.g. complementation, relativization, and adverbial subordination) and coordination strategies (e.g. discourse particles and asyndeton).
The second major area of progress is the analysis of inter-semiotic complementarity, which examines how different modes complement each other. To this end, we have studied textualization strategies in a corpus of women's letters and conducted comparative analyses of Greek and Arabic request letters in the Qurra dossier. These studies have enhanced our understanding of the interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic elements in ancient documents.
In addition, the project has explored novel methodological approaches to discussing communicative variation in documentary sources. This has led us to distinguish between the macro-sociological and quantitative approach of 'semiotic grammar' and the qualitatively oriented 'semiotic discourse analysis'. Rather than viewing these two approaches as completely distinct, they are best conceived as complementary, offering a holistic view of communicative variation.
