H A Typography: body and dress of a text – R T a signing mode between language and image M ABSTRACT HARTMUT STÖCKL is Senior Lecturer in the U This study demonstrates how semiotic T Department of Applied Linguistics at the S theories can be used to understand Institute of Media Communication and T typography. Starting from the assumption Ö Intercultural Communication, Chemnitz C that typography represents a mode/code in K University, Germany. His main research L its own right, which interacts with all other areas are in multimodal media textual signing modes, the article outlines a communication, text linguistics and typographic ‘grammar’ as a structured set of networked resources. The analytical toolkit is stylistics. His most recent publication, then illustrated with the help of two sample texts. Based on some general semiotic Language in the Image – The Image in reflections about the nature and operations of the graphic sign, this article also attempts a Language (de Gruyter, 2004) analyses the concise account of typographic meaning making and its communicative effects. numerous interrelations between language and image in printed mass media texts KEY WORDS (journalism and advertising) and especially communicative effects I domains of typographic work I graphic sign I language vs image emphasizes the pictorial nature of I meaning making I pictoriality I semiotic layer language. TYPOGRAPHY AND LINGUISTIC/SEMIOTIC THEORY Address: Institut für Medienkommunikation With respect to the history (Lechner, 1981; Raible, 1991) and practice (Willberg, 2002; und Interkulturelle Kommunikation Willberg and Forssman, 1999) of typography, ‘body’ and ‘dress’ are complementary and apt Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft, metaphors for how graphic designers and typographers might look at their work. When Philosophische Fakultät, Technische applied to possible stances of linguistics towards typography, however, these metaphors Universität Chemnitz, Thüringer Weg 11, serve to highlight two contrasting approaches. Those that view typography as the ‘body’ 09107 Chemnitz, Germany. [email: assume that it is the material precondition of any text. Just as there is no speech without [email protected]] voice qualities and intonation, there is no written document without (typo)-graphic qualities. In this sense, both typography and prosody are indispensable paraverbal qualities, which would seem inherently tied to various linguistic and pragmatic levels of an utterance. When we look at typography as the ‘dress’ of a text, it merely forms its outer shell, its designable surface, which can be thought of as further removed from the linguistics of a text. It would at best be the sociolinguist, then, who might share an interest in typography as it reveals something about the nature of the text producer or says something about the kind of social or aesthetic address (audience design, Bell, 2001) intended. Not surprisingly, then, traditional linguists have tended not show much interest in typography or graphic design. In their view, writing is secondary to speech, merely an instrument for encoding spoken language. Consequently, linguists have concentrated on the phoneme-grapheme correlations in different languages and on the nature of various writing systems (Dürscheid, 2002), but have ignored the individual variability of sign tokens. Saussurean-style linguists have also erroneously focused on the sentence or smaller linear units of language and thus failed to understand the spatial nature of text on the page and its organizing effects (Waller, 1991). So it is only the more recent, semiotics-inspired trends in text linguistics and stylistics (Fix, 2001; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Stöckl, 2004), which have acknowledged the crucial function of typography and text design. Following the dictum that meaning can be made with the help of various sign systems and that language is mostly tied to non-verbal modes in communicative practice, typography can be understood as a mode/code in its own right. It contributes to textual meaning in numerous ways and must be seen as a challenge to linguistic and semiotic theories as its workings within the text are both visual communication 4(2) 76 77 visual communication 4(2) inherently tied to language as well as relatively independent from it. What insight then does a semiotic take of typography reveal? First of all, writing can be called a connotative sign system (in the sense of Barthes, 1996) as it uses content-form combinations of a primary sign system (language) as signifiers in a secondary system (typography). Although this explains the relatively close connection between graphic design and aspects of language, things are slightly more complicated. Berger (1979: 12) has shown that typographic elements are complex signs which comprise Figure 2: Art from ‘Fear of diy-ing’ (The Guardian, Weekend, various semiotic layers, each capable of independently conveying meaning. First, typo- 1 7 July 2 0 0 4). graphy, of course, serves to encode language. Whether writing substitutes for speech – as traditional linguists would have it – or whether graphic signs form an autonomous sign system that takes elements of reality or mental concepts as its signifieds – as semioticians (Nöth, 1985: 264) and practitioners (Stötzner, 2003: 285) claim – this does not alter the fact that readers need to decode graphic signs in order to make linguistic meaning (graphemes into phonemes or lexemes, etc.). Second, beyond this elementary and highly automated level, literate users of typography will also notice various aspects of graphic and visual detail which convey often subtle, never completely redundant and invariably connotative, meanings. Here, type faces may point to the nature of the document, carry emotional values or indicate the writer’s intended audience, and aspects of the layout may serve to reinforce the thematic structure of a given text and facilitate access to its information. Finally, on yet another level of typographic meaning making, the graphic signs of writing can assume Figure 3: Da Luca (The Guardian, Weekend, 1 9 June 2 0 0 4). pictorial qualities. Thus, letters may form visual shapes which stand for objects from reality, signal states-of-affairs or actions, and illustrate emotions. Materials and techniques of graphic sign making, too, may be made salient in text design and can thus convey some- Figure 1: EMI (The Guardian Unlimited – The Guide , thing about situation, genre and stylistic intent of a communicative occurrence – this is also 2 6 June–2 July 2 0 0 4). a pictorial kind of communication. It is this threefold semiotic nature of typography that provides its communicative flexibility. As Gross (1994: 76) puts it, producers and recipients alike can shift between Gebrauchstypographie or Lesetypographie (typography for reading) versus Akzidenztypographie different ‘modes of signification’ (Signifikationsmodi ), whose readings intermingle and or Displaytypographie (typography for special occasions). While text types which adhere to interrelate. Interestingly, the three semiotic layers of typography correspond to the three the former aim to keep to established typographic standards so as to be easily recognizable general types of signs (according to Peircean semiotics): reading is mainly symbolic, an act and highly functional, text types abiding by the latter practise a playful approach to of deciphering conventional signs, but it can take on indexical and iconic qualities. In many typographic patterns, which seeks to use the pictorial potential of typography to the full ways, registering the connotative and pictorial aspects of typographic design can be seen to (Gaede, 2002: 501ff.). be prior to the symbolic decoding in the process of reading as graphic shapes intrude upon As image and pictoriality are many-faceted and somewhat vague terms in semiotics and our perception as gestalt properties of images. linguistics (Stöckl, 2004), it may be useful to briefly sketch out to what extent and in what ways typography can be attributed pictorial qualities. Generally, there is no difference in GRAPHIC SIGNS BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND IMAGE the graphic sign’s affiliation with language or image. Stötzner (2003: 285) rightly points out The German word Schriftbild (writing + picture) neatly epitomizes readers’ ability to that it is mainly its higher degree of complexity and its figurative nature which mark the abstract from the linguistic function of writing and focus on its pictorial qualities. When pictorial graphic sign off from the verbal graphic sign, although ‘a neat dividing line cannot they do this, they partly and temporarily ignore the symbolic nature of typography and be drawn’. With recourse to Goodman’s (1976) theory of semiotic density, it is correct to say perceive a written document as a designed surface, a layout of graphic elements in the that the more relevant the graphic aspects of a sign’s gestalt are to its meaning, the more it space of a page. Of course, texts differ as to the pictorial qualities of their typography and is likely to be pictorial in nature. Consequently, typography already starts assuming graphic design. Although no text genre completely dispenses with the connotative pictorial dimensions once recipients notice certain graphic qualities (font type, size, weight, properties of typography, some (e.g. advertising, Berger, 2001) are clearly more closely contrast, tension, ending, colour, direction, position, etc.) over and above the type of the allied to the use of pictorial effects than others