January 30, 2004

The typographic contribution to language: Towards a model of typographic genres and their underlying structures

"This thesis presents a model which accounts for variations in typographic form in terms of four underlying sources of structure. The first three relate to the three parts of the writer-text-reader relationship: topic structure, representing the expressive intentions of the writer; artefact structure, resulting from the physical constraints of the medium; and access structure, anticipating the needs of the self-organized reader. Few texts exhibit such structures in pure form. Instead, they are evidenced in typographic genres—ordinary language categories such as 'leaflet', 'magazine', 'manual', and so on - which may be defined in terms of their normal (or historical) combination of topic, access and artefact structure." (Rob Waller PhD. Thesis 1987) - courtesy of karel van der waarde

Posted by PJB at January 30, 2004 10:02 AM | TrackBack

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