Text', 'book', 'writing', and the medial aspect of language

Compared to the narrower linguistics of the recent past, the rounded-out linguistics of the 1980s, deepened by semantics/pragmatics/discourse and broadened by sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, offers (and should seek) much closer collaboration with typographers. In particular, linguistics no longer ignores writing, but is beginning to address itself to the existence of more than one medium of language (the medial aspect); it must develop a graphology which goes beyond the analysis of the linear features of writing-systems to embrace the non-linear resources of writing, so different from those of speech. The linguist's distinctive conceptual approach is illustrated by his use of the key term 'text'.