Intertwined registers. The interaction between the linguistic, graphemic, and graphetic dimensions of variation in a text language

The study of registers usually focuses exclusively on the linguistic dimension of variation, examining the correlations between the situation of use and an array of linguistic features (e.g., Halliday & Hasan 1989; Biber & Conrad 2009; Neumann 2014). In this talk, I will argue that, when studying text languages (Fleischman 2000), the specificities of the written medium cannot be ignored (Kammerzell 1998). Hence, the notion of “register” could be fruitfully extended, so as to cover the graphemic and graphetic types of variation that are typical of written communications (for this distinction, see Meletis 2020). I will mostly draw examples from Ancient Egyptian — going beyond the analysis of linguistic parameters, which have been mostly investigated so far (e.g., Goldwasser 1990; Gillen 2014; Polis 2018) —, but examples from other scribal cultures will also be explored in order to situate the results in a broader perspective (Klinkenberg & Polis 2018).