ABSTRACT
As one of the main foci of the discussion on language and communication, the debate on speech and writing, and on the primacy of one or the other medium, has produced different outcomes throughout the ages. 1 From the time of Antiquity, preference has been given in turn to orality and literacy — and these preferences do not only reflect the differing values of each specific culture, but they also highlight what that culture thinks about itself, and the nature of its own civilisation. The debate has continually juxtaposed two quite distinct philosophical positions. On the one hand, since Plato orality has been repeatedly praised as the 'original', pristine form of communication, whose fragile 'image' is to be found in writing. On the other hand, the so-called 'alphabetic bias' of modern Western societies (to use Roy Harris's definition 2 ) values literacy at the expense of orality, which it views as a more primitive form of communication, reflecting a less advanced state of social and cultural development. This bias is apparent, for example, in the definition of orality reported in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, where the phenomenon is seen from the perspective of literacy, as 'the character of a society in which spoken language has the roles associated, in literary societies, e.g. in Europe, with writing: thus, in particular, that of having an oral rather than a written literature'. 3 This bias is also exemplified by Ong's clear-cut distinction between primary and secondary orality — characterising cultures before and after the advent of writing — which allows secondary orality to re-enter the scene of contemporary society only as a come-back phenomenon that is triggered by the predominance of the oral/aural dimension of the media. 4 But while traditional scholarship has tended to adopt an oppositional approach to the study of orality and literacy, more recent research has questioned the binary, hierarchical nature of these two phenomena, and has moved towards a more flexible, encompassing, cross-modal model of communication, which recognises the relative — rather than fixed — relationship between speech and writing. 5 This approach better accounts for a variety of spoken, written or 'mixed' texts, ranging from television programmes, emails or text messages on mobile phones — media in which the clear-cut opposition between spoken and written features collapses. At the core of this new model of communication is the distinction, which recent research has readdressed, between parlato — and in particular its prototypical form of face-to-face interaction — and 94orality — 'the quality of being oral, or orally communicated' and 'the preference for or tendency to use spoken forms of language'. 6
