Graphics and Layout in the New Kingdom Epistolary Documents: Some Considerations

The graphic production of a text, i.e. its organization in space, is as meaningful as the linguistic statement. The division into paragraphs, or the graphic highlighting of certain parts of the text, for example, are part of the semantic information carried by the discourse. The choice of the support, the ink, the writing instrument or even the writing itself is usually as motivated as the choice of words and grammatical constructions. Different factors are involved: the use of the document, the literary genre to which the written text belongs, the person to whom the speaker is addressed, the economic and socio-cultural context, etc.
This paper focuses on the dialectic between linguistic and visual statements (text formatting, writing style) through the study of New Kingdom epistolary documents. This corpus includes both documents of everyday life (letters) and literary texts that have the form of a letter (literary letters, teachings, etc.). After showing the type of information that the visual statement can convey, I will examine the way in which graphic and linguistic codes are articulated within this eclectic corpus, using the concepts of registers and repertoires. The presentation will show how linguistics can rely on material philology for a living interpretation of texts.