ABSTRACT
Study of the contrast between orality and literacy is largely unfinished business. What has recently been learned about this contrast continues to enlarge understanding not only of the oral past, but also of the present, liberating our text-bound minds and setting much of what has long been familiar in new perspectives. Here I shall suggest some of the seemingly more interesting new perspectives and insights, but only some, for it is impossible to be inclusive or complete. I shall present the matter here in the form of theorems; more or less hypothetical statements that connect in various ways with what has already been explained here about orality and the orality-literacy shift. If the foregoing chapters have been even moderately successful, the reader should be able to carry the theorems farther as well as to generate his or her own theorems and supplementary insights.
