Towards a typology of diagrams in linguistics

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to lay out the foundations of a typology of diagrams in linguistics. We draw a distinction between linguistic parameters — concerning what information is being represented — and diagrammatic parameters — concerning how it is represented. The six binary linguistic parameters of the typology are: (i) mono- versus multilingual, (ii) static versus dynamic, (iii) mono- versus multimodular, (iv) object-level versus meta-level, (v) qualitative versus quantitative, and (vi) mono- versus interdisciplinary. The two diagrammatic parameters are (i) iconic/concrete versus symbolic/abstract representation and (ii) static versus dynamic representation. We briefly illustrate how different types of linguistic diagrams can be analysed in terms of the interaction between the linguistic and the diagrammatic parameters.