Periodic Reporting for period 3 - EVWRIT (Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt (I - VIII AD). A Socio-Semiotic Study of Communicative Variation)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-06-01 al 2022-11-30
Writing in Classical antiquity is perhaps associated most with ‘canonical’ authors such as Homer, Plato and Sophocles. In the dry sands of Egypt, however, thousands of ‘everyday' (non-literary) documents have been preserved, mostly in Greek, ranging from very informal genres such as school texts and shopping lists to very formal ones, such as petitions and imperial edicts. Such documents have provided and continue to provide a key witness four our knowledge of the history, religion, economy, education, etc. of Ancient Egypt, and by extension the Ancient world. This project claims that these everyday documents have even more value: since they represent autographs – contrary to the manuscripts on which literary texts have been preserved – they can also inform us about communication practices in antiquity. In order to better understand the mechanisms of such communication practices, the project maps social contexts of writing on the one hand and variation in expression on the other, and tries to relate them. By doing so, the project aims to develop a more holistic perspective towards the 'meaning' of non-literary documents, and to extend the study of communication practices from the present day to antiquity, ultimately providing new insights about humans as social and communicative beings.
In order to study communicative variation in antiquity, we have created a new digital database that allows to annotate everyday documents not only for their socio-pragmatic background (elements such as the social status of the sender and the receiver, whether their relationship is hierarchical or not, what the communicative goals of the sender are, etc.), but also for their communicative characteristics. Language is of course central to the general outlook of everyday documents, but a basic tenet of the project is that one should go beyond language: visual and material elements such as the format, lay-out, handwriting, etc. are also taken into account, as well as elements that lie in between the linguistic and visual appearance of documents strictly speaking, such as their orthography and language choice.
Rather than exhaustively annotating the entire papyrological corpus (currently featuring more than 60.000 texts), the project concentrates on a ‘focus corpus’ of some 5.000 texts, which has been almost entirely annotated for socio-pragmatic background. We have approached the study of communicative variation in the corpus by doing case studies of specific features: so, for example, various studies have appeared or are in print about variation in the way people combined clauses and sentences to create text – ranging from subordination strategies such as complementation, relativization and adverbial subordination to coordination strategies such as discourse particles and asyndeton. Another area in which substantial progress has been made is how to methodologically approach the study of communicative variation in antiquity: the project is based on recent insights in social semiotics and multimodality, but is also open to exploring and including other methods, a theme about which we have held a conference, and which has resulted in an edited volume (published by Brill, 2022).
Rather than exhaustively annotating the entire papyrological corpus (currently featuring more than 60.000 texts), the project concentrates on a ‘focus corpus’ of some 5.000 texts, which has been almost entirely annotated for socio-pragmatic background. We have approached the study of communicative variation in the corpus by doing case studies of specific features: so, for example, various studies have appeared or are in print about variation in the way people combined clauses and sentences to create text – ranging from subordination strategies such as complementation, relativization and adverbial subordination to coordination strategies such as discourse particles and asyndeton. Another area in which substantial progress has been made is how to methodologically approach the study of communicative variation in antiquity: the project is based on recent insights in social semiotics and multimodality, but is also open to exploring and including other methods, a theme about which we have held a conference, and which has resulted in an edited volume (published by Brill, 2022).
By developing new digital infrastructure to annotate documentary texts from a communicative perspective, by performing in-depth case studies of selected areas of communicative variation, and by discussing methodological angles to approach communicative variation from, the project has already made significant progress. In each of these areas, we would now like to increase our effort and impact not only by making available the annotated corpus, but also by enlarging the number of case studies, and by bringing together the results: we have been developing a website that will not only allow the broader audience to access our results, but also team members to query the corpus in novel ways. We hope to establish a connection between the EVWRIT-website and already existing, complementary initiatives such as the Trismegistos portal and Marja Vierros’ Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri. Apart from annotating the focus corpus socio-pragmatically, all team members have started doing elaborate case studies on communicative variation: team members work on a thematic basis, so that they can combine their results into a PhD thesis and later monograph. An ambitious goal of the project is to see how all of the results that have been obtained can be combined, and whether communicative registers and genres can be uncovered: the PI has already published a number of papers with suggestions about how to approach the corpus from such an all-encompassing, holistic perspective, and is aiming to extend this strand of research.