ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a conceptual background for this study. The study examines Persian Nastaliq calligraphy revolving around different insights of multimodal social semiotics and relying on the findings of a corpus study of Persian Nastaliq calligraphy to examine calligraphic letterforms for the extent of their functionality and independence from language to make autonomous sense as graphic forms beyond linguistic practices and conventional meanings embedded in language. This chapter also presents background on the current state of the research, historical background on the main object of the study, Nastaliq calligraphy, as well as background on theoretical and methodological schema used in this study (i.e., theory of multimodal social semiotics with special consideration of the fundamental assumptions of Halliday’s (1978) social semiotic theory of communication about sign and Johannessen’s descriptive systems of SHAPE and ENSHAPENING), and graphetic theory of articulation.
The chapter also explains traditional notions of implementation in Nastaliq calligraphy which the study addresses in the process of analysis. Furthermore, the chapter clarifies how the study is structured. Also, it makes some determinations about the experimental materials and the corpus used for analysis in the study; that is, a corpus of 300 images of Persian Nastaliq calligraphy is selected through a non-probability sampling approach and created by the author in the Chalipa artwork software.
