Semiotic Rupture and the Emergence of Writing: Toward a Multimodal Model of Representational Innovation

Writing is a unique—and distinctively human—creation, one which arose independently in only six locations worldwide. From these primary sites of innovation, this relatively recent technology spread across the world. Its development is routinely lauded as one of humanity’s most important inventions, among its “greatest intellectual and cultural achievements,” and a key to human evolution. The scholar Florian Coulmas labels it “the single most important sign system ever invented on our planet. This presentation presents a theoretical framework for modeling the emergence, development, and structure of writing and other visual representational systems through a formal, processual lens. Building on Noam Chomsky’s distinction between internal language (I-language) and its externalization as E-language, we model writing as the mediated product of E-language and propose a set of visual analogues: I-image and E-image, understood as structurally similar generative systems. We offer a formal, cross- and multimodal model of writing and its development that treats it not as a codified extension of speech, but as a recursive reorganization of visual and linguistic generative systems. Rather than asking what writing is, we ask how it and other semiotic systems emerge. What tensions, pressures, and interactions catalyze their formation, transformation, and typological diversity? We contend that the semiotic dynamics that give rise to writing are not isolated or unique events, but are grounded in deeper processes, such as those underlying the emergence of image-making, that are already established in the cognitive evolution of Homo sapiens and plausibly present in ancestral hominins. That is, we see writing not as a spontaneous invention but as an emergent semiotic modality grounded in cognitive evolution and cultural externalization.