Metalanguage of Literacy

Metalanguage of Literacy is a concept from David Olson’s The Mind on Paper, which is in a sense a “sequel” to his much more wide-ranging The World on Paper. According to Olson, writing has to represent not simply speech (what was actually said) but an entire speech situation. That is, everything in a speech situation that contributes to meaning—tone, context, gesture, the social relations between the interlocutors, and so on—has to be represented by words in the written text. We would have to imagine that in a completely oral culture, one person reporting the words of another (“he said…”) would simply imitate the way that person said it but in a way that included an implicit judgment in the way it is repeated. So, if someone wants to convey that the words he is repeating are false, he might repeat them in a mocking way. You can’t write in a mocking way, so you have to use a word like “claim” to distance yourself from the speech you are reporting. You have to say things like “he supposedly saw a lion.” That “supposedly” supplements the mocking tone of voice (or mimicry) that would have been used in an oral report of the other’s speech. The metalanguage of literacy is this production of supplements to the oral speech situation.

Once we have a word like “supposedly,” we can turn it into a noun and we have “supposition.” Once we have “suppositions,” “assumptions,” “implications,” “suggestions,” and so on, we also need a location to “deposit” them, and this location becomes the “mind” or the “intellect,” which now is transformed into an object we can study: we can ask all kinds of questions regarding how we arrive at, how we maintain, how we use, how we revise and reject, and so on, our suppositions, assumptions, beliefs, and so on. All the disciplines that arise from these questions are products of this metalanguage of literacy.