Talks by Dimitrios Meletis
In grapholinguistics (and linguistics in general), ‘orthography’ remains a contentious term let a... more In grapholinguistics (and linguistics in general), ‘orthography’ remains a contentious term let alone concept. Since English is a self-regulating writing system (cf. BERG/ARONOFF 2017, 2018) not or-thographically regulated by any official authority of linguistic policy, ‘orthography’ has often been used as a descriptive term more or less synonymous to ‘writing system’ in central and highly visible anglophone literature. In contrast, in other grapholinguistic traditions – such as the germanophone –, ‘orthography’ is interpreted prescriptively and tied to notions of normativity and system-external regulation (cf. NEEF 2015, DÜRSCHEID 2016, MELETIS 2020). While descriptive grapholinguistics (and its most prominent subbranch of graphematics) is concerned with what is systematic (or ‘grammatical’), i.e., conforms to the regularities of the system, orthography adds to this the evalua-tive and (meta)¬prag¬ma¬tic¬ally relevant notion of ‘correctness’.
However, the existence of orthographic standardization cannot be captured by a simplifying dichotomy, with systems like English classified as unregulated and systems like German as officially regulated; instead, there is a whole variety of different orthographies that serve as a normative benchmark in writing systems, rendering their respective users aware of the (in)correctness of scribal practices. In this paper, such different types of orthography will be described with the help of sever-al criteria that form the basis of a preliminary typology. In systems that are equipped with one, an orthography becomes a structural matter; however, it always originates as a social phenomenon, which is echoed by the predominantly sociolinguistic nature of the following criteria (cf. also CA-HILL 2014, HINTON 2014):
— Natural vs. artificial captures whether the orthographic conventions in a writing system have de-veloped naturally, through implicit negotiations among users during the prolonged continued use of the writing system (cf. MIHM 2016 for premodern orthographies), to become a ‘phenomenon of the third kind’ (cf. KELLER 2014), or whether they are artificial in the sense of having either been (1) implemented for an existing and established writing system without consideration of the actual use of that system (whether said system already had an orthographic standardization or not), or (2) im-plemented immediately during/after the creation of a new writing system, which has thus never been in use without a standardization.
— Regulated vs. unregulated describes, in a narrow sense, whether an orthographic standardization is officially regulated by an external stakeholder of linguistic policy (such as the Council for German Orthography in the case of German orthography) or not (such as English orthographies; cf. also KARAN 2014).
— Codified vs. uncodified reflects whether orthographic conventions are externally and explicitly cod-ified as rules – whether these are officially regulated or not. Types of codifications include rule-books, guidelines, and dictionaries. Notably, orthographies can be unregulated but codified (such as English orthographies, for which there exist dictionaries with – strictly speaking – only nonofficial status).
— Original vs. reformed is a subcriterion assessing whether a regulated codified orthography exists in its first, i.e., original form, or whether it has been reformed, i.e., re-codified, at least once.
— Community involvement vs. no community involvement (or a continuum of bottom-up vs. top-down standardization): In a loose sense, this criterion pertains to the involvement of users in the (implicit or explicit, gradual or onetime) establishment of orthographic conventions, their codifica-tion as rules, and their potential reform, i.e., bottom-up processes of standardization. In a narrow sense, it describes whether community members are involved in the (initial) explicit regulation and possibly codification of orthographic rules (cf. BOW 2013, PAGE 2013 for case studies) – which is the case mostly in the context of literacy development (cf. LÜPKE 2011, the contributions in CA-HILL/RICE 2014), i.e., the creation of new writing systems from scratch.
— As the first of two criteria that are structural in nature, variable vs. nonvariable establishes a con-tinuum capturing the degree of a writing system’s graphematic variability. It thus determines the possibility of (licensed or unlicensed) graphematic variation and with it, the expression of social (non-denotative) meaning and creativity etc. in writing. The Japanese writing system, for example, often affords multiple ways of writing the same word (or, more generally, utterance) without a devi-ance from the norm automatically being perceived as strictly ‘incorrect’ (cf. JOYCE/MASUDA 2019). It is crucial whether these variable parts of a writing system are unregulated, as there may exist graphematically highly variable writing systems which are strictly regulated and thus do not afford the same possibilities for ‘correct’ graphematic variation.
— Motivated vs. arbitrary is used to evaluate whether orthographic conventions/rules are based on the graphematics of the writing system, i.e., its internal systematics and its actual usage, in which case they are motivated, or whether they are arbitrary and based on other (external) considerations.
It is important to emphasize that this list is, of course, non-exhaustive. However, the proposed crite-ria allow categorizing and comparing different types of orthographic standardization. This can (fi-nally) further our understanding of the status that diverse kinds of norms assume in different writing systems. Notably, linguistic norms arguably play a more prominent role in the written modality than in the spoken one – they possibly even originate in writing and literacy (cf. MĬKIL¬LÄH¬DE/LEP¬PÄ-NEN/IT¬KON¬EN 2019 for normativity in language).
In this paper, not only the listed criteria will be presented – along with examples of writing systems and their orthographies to which they apply in various combinations – but a related im-portant question that will be raised is what bearing this typology has on central normative concepts such as ‘orthographic rule’ and ‘orthographic mistake’. Specifically, differences in the perception of prescriptivity will be highlighted – what to members of one literate community may be a rule (and a deviation from it a mistake) may for members of another community merely be a convention (and a ‘deviation’ from it variation). Fleshing out the basis of grapholinguistic normativity is expected to not only improve our understanding of writing and literacy practices, but pragmatics – and meta-pragmatic beliefs – regarding the linguistic and communicative behavior of members of literate communities in general. Furthermore, it is relevant to applied fields such as literacy development and the reform of existing orthographies.
References
BERG, KRISTIAN & MARK ARONOFF. 2017. Self-organization in the spelling of English suffixes: The emergence of culture out of anarchy. Language 93(1). 37–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2017.0000
BERG, KRISTIAN & MARK ARONOFF. 2018. Further evidence for self-organization in English spelling. Language 94(1). e48–e53. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2018.0013
BOW, CATHERINE. 2013. Community-based orthography development in four Western Zambian languages. Writ-ing Systems Research 5(1). 73–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/17586801.2012.747427
CAHILL, MICHAEL. 2014. Non-linguistic factors in orthographies. In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Develop-ing orthographies for unwritten languages, 9–25. Dallas: SIL International.
CAHILL, MICHAEL & KEREN RICE (eds.). 2014. Developing orthographies for unwritten languages. Dallas: SIL In-ternational.
DÜRSCHEID, CHRISTA. 2016. Einführung in die Schriftlinguistik, 5th edn. (UTB 3740). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
HINTON, LEANNE. 2014. Orthography wars. In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Developing or¬tho¬graphies for unwritten languages, 139–168. Dallas: SIL International.
JOYCE, TERRY & HISASHI MASUDA. 2019. On the notions of orthography and graphematic representation from the perspective of the Japanese writing system. Written Language & Literacy 22(2). 247–279. https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00028.joy
KARAN, ELKE. 2014. Standardization: What’s the hurry? In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Developing or-thographies for unwritten languages, 107–138. Dallas: SIL International.
KELLER, RUDI. 2014. Sprachwandel: von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache, 4th edn. (UTB, 1567). Tübingen: Francke.
LÜPKE, FRIEDERIKE. 2011. Orthography development. In Peter Austoin & Julia Sallabank (eds.), Hand-book of en-dangered languages, 312–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975981.016
MÄKILLÄHDE, ALEKSI, VILLE LEPPÄNEN & ESA ITKONEN. 2019. Norms and normativity in language and linguistics: Basic concepts and contextualization. In Aleksi Mäkillähde, Ville Leppänen & Esa Itkonen (eds.), Norms and normativity in language and linguistics, 1–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.209.01mak
MELETIS, DIMITRIOS. 2020. The nature of writing. A theory of grapholinguistics (Grapholinguistics and Its Applica-tions 3). Brest: Fluxus Éditions. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-meletis
MIHM, AREND. 2016. Zur Theorie der vormodernen Orthographien: Straßburger Schreibsysteme als Erkenntnis-grundlage. Sprachwissenschaft 41(3–4). 271–309.
NEEF, MARTIN. 2015. Writing systems as modular objects: Proposals for theory design in grapholinguistics. Open Linguistics 1. 708–721. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2015-0026
PAGE, CHRISTINA J. 2013. A new orthography in an unfamiliar script: A case study in participatory engagement strategies. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34(5). 459–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2013.783035
‘Writing system typology’, thus far, is closely associated with a descriptive classification of w... more ‘Writing system typology’, thus far, is closely associated with a descriptive classification of writing systems focusing on the linguistic level (phonemic, syllabic, morphemic) that the basic units of writing systems relate to – their main underlying criterion, thus, is ‘dominant level of representational mapping’ (cf. Joyce/Meletis in press). Such typologies have been used to show how writing systems function at their core as well as to highlight both similarities and differences between them. Arguably, however, due their narrow scope, many potentially relevant features and parallels remain blind spots.
These start already at the structural level, as the restricted focus on the relation between writing and language results in a disregard of systematic structural features that are intrinsic to writing systems, i.e., not determined by their relation to language. These include, for example, allography, i.e., systematic variation of variant units in writing, or graphotactics, the rules of how units of writing may combine to form larger units (such as written words, sentences, etc.). Notably, a restriction to structure dismisses paramount questions concerning the use of writing systems, e.g., how they are processed and used for communication, bringing to the fore psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Potential criteria for possible psycholinguistic typologies of writing include, for example, spacing between graphemes or written words, or the visual complexity exhibited by the script used for a writing system. A candidate for a sociolinguistic typology is the degree of normativity and prescriptivism characterizing a literate culture, which is established, among other things, by asking if and how the writing system in question is orthographically regulated and how this affects users’ literacy practices and ideologies pertaining to writing.
Since, in a comprehensive and integrated theory of writing, a writing system must always simultaneously be considered as a system with its own idiosyncratic features, a semiotic system relating to a given language, a graphic medium that must be physiologically and cognitively processed, and a communication tool and a cultural technique embedded in a given context and culture, structural, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives arguably should never be adopted completely divorced from each other (cf. Meletis 2020). This talk aims not only to present different structural and use-based typologies of writing that go beyond those brought forth by ‘traditional’ writing system typology but also to show how they are connected and interact with each other and, importantly, how this can increase our know¬ledge of the fundamental nature of writing.
REFERENCES
Joyce, Terry & Dimitrios Meletis (in press): Alternative criteria for writing system typology. Cross-linguistic observations from the German and Japanese writing systems. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft Special Issue.
Meletis, Dimitrios (2020): The nature of writing. A theory of grapholinguistics (= Grapholinguistics and Its Applications; 3). Brest: Fluxus Editions. DOI: 10.36824/2020-meletis.
Graphotactics captures the “restrictions on ways in which” elements of writing “may combine with ... more Graphotactics captures the “restrictions on ways in which” elements of writing “may combine with each other” (McCawley 1994: 115) to form larger written units. These restrictions take on many forms in the world’s diverse writing systems. For instance, users of the English alphabet likely know that <v> almost never occurs word-finally as <e> is commonly added after it, cf. <have>, <give> (cf. Berg 2016: 2). Phonographically, these words (/hæv/ and /ɡɪv/) would not require a written word-final <e>, underlining that notwithstanding important parallels, graphotactics is not always dependent on phonotactics. This is a vital point in arguing that writing systems not only represent various levels of language but are also their own systems exhibiting distinct features—and it is paramount that they be studied (also) as such.
Despite graphotactics being a core feature of writing systems, research on it—especially comparative—is scarce. This talk aims to systematize various types of restrictions, including, at the subsegmental level, favored positions of semantic and phonological components inside Chinese characters that “determine whether the character is legal or not” (Ho/Ng/Ng 2003: 853). As for larger written units, in many abu¬gi¬das such as Devanāgarī or Thai, secondary vowel graphemes occur in specific positions around consonants, with some being misaligned in appearing before consonants despite following them in speech (cf. Winskel 2009). A well-known length-related example is the ‘three-letter-rule’ in English: content words must consist of at least three letters (distinguishing <buy> from <by>).
Crucially, graphotactic regularities are independent of external orthographic regulation and thus not explicit, codified rules but intrinsic to writing systems as self-regulating systems and thus part of users’ implicit knowledge. They rely fundamentally on a two-dimensional spatiality that departs from the linear temporality of speech. This makes graphotactics central in arguing that writing systems are indeed systematic in nature.
References
Berg, Kristian (2016): Graphemic analysis and the spoken language bias. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 388. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00388
Ho, Connie S.-H., Ting-Ting Ng & Wing-Kin Ng (2003): A ‘radical’ approach to reading development in Chinese: the role of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals. Journal of Literacy Research 35.3: 849-878. DOI: 10.1207/s15548430jlr3503_3
McCawley, James D. (1994): Some graphotactic constraints. In W. C. Watt (ed.), Writing systems and cognition (= Neuropsychology and Cognition, 6), 115-127. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8285-8_7
Winskel, Heather (2009): Reading in Thai: the case of misaligned vowels. Reading and Writing 22.1: 1-24. DOI: 10.1007/s11145-007-9100-z
Writing has long been identified as a central factor in the standardization of languages. Yet, th... more Writing has long been identified as a central factor in the standardization of languages. Yet, the effect of literacy on (standard) language ideologies remains understudied to this day (but cf. Johnson 2002, Dickinson 2015, Weth & Juffermans 2018), as do the public’s attitudes on orthographic standardization. However, it is becoming increasingly important as the relation between authorities of language policy and the ‘lay’ people who are affected by policies has gradually changed, causing a new kind of ‘twenty-first-century prescriptivism’ (cf. Heyd 2014: 491) to evolve in which normativity is no longer negotiated exclusively top-down but is also constituted by bottom-up processes (especially of digital nature in the realm of the internet). This talk is devoted to an investigation of said prescriptivism.
In a recent pilot study 21 semi-structured interviews with Austrian university students were conducted to investigate attitudes on (i) orthographic regulation, (ii) deviances from the written standard and denigrating public corrections of mistakes (so-called ‘orthographic shaming’), as well as (iii) changes of orthography, i.e. spelling reforms and involved stakeholders.
Many of the participants’ utterances, e.g. “Every time that I’m writing somewhere, I’m writing, and therefore it has to be correct”, were entrenched in normativity and (self-)prescriptivism, the most important aspects of which will be traced in this talk, as a metapragmatic discourse analysis of the interviews shows that in a literate community whose writing is orthographically regulated, (1) normativity appears to be inherent to literacy practices, which are strongly affected by standard language ideologies, (2) knowledge of various norms pertaining to the written standard is considered social/cultural capital and is instrumentalized in the establishment and reinforcement of hierarchies of power, and that, generally, (3) the public’s nuanced attitudes towards orthography and literacy prove invaluable in examining the interaction between the status of prescriptive orthographies as central cornerstones of linguistic policy and everyday literacy practices.
Dickinson, Jennifer A. (2015): Introduction: Language ideologies and writing systems. Pragmatics 25.4: 507–516.
Heyd, Theresa (2014): Folk-linguistic landscapes: The visual semiotics of digital enregisterment. Language in Society 43: 489–514.
Johnson, Sally (2002): On the origin of linguistic norms: orthography, ideology and the first con-stitutional challenge to the 1996 reform of German. Language in Society 31: 549-576.
Weth, Constanze & Kasper Juffermans (2018): Introduction: The tyranny of writing in language and society. In Constanze Weth & Kasper Juffermans (eds.), The tyranny of writing: Ideologies of the written word, 1–19. London, New York: Bloomsbury.
Schrift bildet Sprache graphisch ab. Sie ist eine menschliche Erfindung, ein Artefakt. Dennoch st... more Schrift bildet Sprache graphisch ab. Sie ist eine menschliche Erfindung, ein Artefakt. Dennoch steckt viel Natur in ihr: Seit Jahrtausenden vom Menschen verwendet, sind die Schriften der Welt gezeichnet von seiner biologischen, kognitiven und sozialen Natur. Ein Beispiel: Zunächst waren die Formen von Schriftzeichen sehr bildhaft und ähnelten visuell den Objekten, die verschriftlicht werden sollten – weil sie so einfacher zu erfinden und im Gedächtnis zu behalten waren. Warum aber sind heute Schriftzeichen grösstenteils abstrakt? Weil bildhafte Zeichen oft auch visuell komplex und damit schwierig zu schreiben sind und Menschen nach möglichst wenig Aufwand beim Schreiben streben. Im Kurzvortrag zeigen wir anhand von Beispielen, auf welche Weise die Natur des Menschen Schrift zu dem gemacht hat, was sie heute ist.
Writing systems research – or grapholinguistics – is steadily gaining traction as an accepted sub... more Writing systems research – or grapholinguistics – is steadily gaining traction as an accepted subfield of linguistics. While it is often advertised and treated as a ‘young’ field, it is rather the case that we lack awareness of its history.
This talk aims to contribute to a first historiographic account by discussing and contextualizing the main points of three disputes centering on issues of writing and encapsulating the most pressing questions the discipline studies to this day.
In the first dispute, prolific writing researcher Peter T. Daniels proclaims – in a LACUS Forum talk – that “[t]here cannot be a structural graphemics” (Daniels 1991: 528) since writing systems cannot be treated with the same concepts as language. He argues that writing is merely a representation of language with no systematics of its own, thus rejecting the possibility of concepts such as grapheme. In a response, Earl M. Herrick (Herrick 1994) takes the opposite stance: writing is a system of its own and has idiosyncratic features that can only be captured in an independent grapholinguistic analysis. In two talks/papers as well as two additional replies, the two scholars adhere to views referred to as the dependency view and the autonomy view, respectively, reproducing an argument with a long tradition in German grapholinguistics, the crucial questions of which are being discussed to this day as they have a bearing on the very raison d’être of grapholinguistics as its own discipline.
In the second argument, Herbert E. Brekle attacks semiotician W. C. Watt’s (1994) view of the diachronic development of writing as a systematic evolutionary process not unsimilar to that of language. Specifically, Brekle (1994) criticizes four evolutionary ‘forces’ assumed by Watt: homogenization, facilitation, heterogenization, and inertia, addressing not only their (un)consciousness but also their cognitive reality as well as the problematics of the teleology they imply. Additionally, Brekle laments that vital factors of economical, technical, and social nature remain unaccounted for in Watt’s framework.
The third dispute starts with Primus’ (2004) claim of form-function-correlations between visual features of Roman letters and phonological features of the phonemes they represent, which is forcefully attacked by Rezec (2010). This argument touches on the core of the question of how writing is approached as a subject and the systematics one attempts or expects to find in it. This links it to the first two arguments in that it addresses whether writing is merely a representational system or its own system as well as whether, in its diachronic development, iconic relations between the visual and the linguistic such as proposed by Primus could have been established.
Even though they represent only three points in a gradual development, these disputes are strikingly representative of contemporary discourses in grapholinguistics. By contextualizing them and highlighting their relevance for the discipline, this talk is a crucial contribution to a much-needed grapholinguistic historiography.
BREKLE, HERBERT E. (1994): Some thoughts on a historico-genetic theory of the lettershapes of our alphabet. In W. C. WATT (ed.), Writing systems and cognition, 129-139. Dordrecht: Springer.
DANIELS, PETER T. (1991): Is a structural graphemics possible? LACUS Forum 18:528-537.
HERRICK, EARL M. (1994): Of course a structural graphemics is possible! LACUS Forum 21:413-424.
PRIMUS, BEATRICE (2004): A featural analysis of the Modern Roman Alphabet. Written Language and Literacy 7.2:235-274.
REZEC, OLIVER (2010): Der vermeintliche Zusammenhang zwischen Buchstabenformen und Lautwerten. Erwiderung auf einige Thesen von B. Primus. Linguistische Berichte 223:343-366.
WATT, W. C. (1994): Introduction. In W. C. WATT (ed.), Writing systems and cognition, 89-114. Dordrecht: Springer.
Daniels (1992) famously suggested that the syllable plays a special role as the linguistic unit m... more Daniels (1992) famously suggested that the syllable plays a special role as the linguistic unit most salient for writing. He observed that both “[a]ll new writing systems […] invented by nonliterates who know that writing exists” (Daniels 2017: 84) as well as the three independently created writing systems Sumerian, Mayan, and Chinese, are or were syllabaries. This indicates a syllabic origin of writing which has led to the stronger claim of a general primacy of the syllable in writing. This talk aims to collect and critically dissect evidence in support of this claim to arrive at possible answers of why the syllable could be special and what that tells us about the fundamental nature of writing – and language.
The ample evidence pointing to the syllable as a central grapholinguistic unit starts at the structural level: Aside from (parts of) writing systems in which the syllable is the unmarked basic unit of representation, such as the Japanese kana syllabaries or, indirectly, the morpho(syllabo)graphic Chinese writing system, syllabic structures are also reflected in alphabets, i.e. segmental phonographic writing systems. For German and English, for example, a so-called graphematic syllable has been postulated based on the observation that syllable boundaries are visually marked in writing by letters with descenders and ascenders, such as |bel| in German <Gabel> ‘fork’ (cf. Fuhrhop & Buchmann 2009; Fuhrhop, Buchmann & Berg 2011). This visual demarcation of syllables, interestingly, also holds for alphabets using scripts other than Roman such as Greek and Armenian (cf. Meletis 2019). Strikingly, it has been shown that some letters with ascenders or descenders such as |y| were diachronically ousted from the graphematic syllable nucleus precisely because they were gradually functionalized as visual markers of syllable boundaries (cf. Fuhrhop & Schmidt 2014). This begs the question of why and how such a development proceeded. In light of the claim that humans did not evolve to better process writing, a relatively recent invention, but that inversely, writing was gradually ‘changed’ by humans to suit and repurpose existing cognitive abilities (cf. Dehaene 2009), the focus shifts to processing as the central dimension for an inquiry of the syllable’s relevance.
While (segmental) phonological awareness might only be constituted by the acquisition of a segmental writing system which either makes phonological segments accessible or actually constructs them in the first place (cf. Davidson 2019), awareness of the phonological syllable has been found to be more robust and to exist earlier (cf. McBride-Chang & Kail 2002), suggesting that the syllable is not only central in phylogeny, but also in ontogeny. Accordingly, in literacy instruction, for alphabets such as German, methods based on syllables (such as Röber-Siekmeyer 2004) are gaining currency. Fittingly, Inkelas et al. (2013), in their study on the ‘learnability of writing systems’, found that graphemes representing syllables are acquired more easily than graphemes representing segments. Additional experimental evidence suggests that the syllable also plays a crucial role in production. For example, Kandel, Álvarez & Vallée (2006) found that in handwriting, intergrapheme intervals were longer at syllable boundaries than intrasyllabically: the interval between the graphemes in the sequence <gn>, which is always intrasyllabic in French (such as in <consi.gner>) and intersyllabic in Spanish (<consig.nar>), was shorter in French than in Spanish, and not only for monolingual writers of these respective languages, but also for bilingual French-Spanish writers, who systematically produced a shorter interval when writing French. For typing, Will, Nottbusch & Weingarten (2006) showed that inter-keystroke intervals were longer at syllable boundaries than within syllables, implying that syllables are relevant for the motor system.
Evidently, both the structure of writing systems and their processing by writers and readers imply that the syllable is somehow special. On the basis of the cited evidence above, this talk aims to discuss a number of questions: (1) Is the salience of the phonological syllable universal or mediated by the specific syllable structure/phonotactics of given languages? (2) Given the efforts of – mostly German – grapholinguists to define written units independently of units of speech and/or language, do there exist independent ‘syllabic’ structures in writing (cf. Primus 2003)? How are they similar to phonological syllables and how do they diverge from them in different types of writing systems? Finally, preliminary answers to these questions are integrated into the larger question of how writing and speech relate to one another to further our knowledge about the nature of writing and to refine existing models of writing.
References
Daniels, Peter T. (1992): The syllabic origin of writing and the segmental origin of the alphabet. In Pamela Downing, Susan D. Lima & Michael Noonan (eds.), The linguistics of literacy (= Ty-pological Studies in Language, 21), 83-110. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/tsl.21.10dan
Daniels, Peter T. (2017): Writing systems. In Mark Aronoff & Janie Rees-Miller (eds.), The handbook of linguistics, 2nd edition, 75-94. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781119072 256.ch5
Davidson, Andrew (2019): Writing: the re-construction of language. Language Sciences 72: 134-149. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2018.09.004
Dehaene, Stanislas (2009): Reading in the brain: the new science of how we read. London: Penguin.
Fuhrhop, Nanna & Franziska Buchmann (2009): Die Längenhierarchie: Zum Bau der graphematischen Silbe. Linguistische Berichte 218: 127-155.
Fuhrhop, Nanna, Franziska Buchmann & Kristian Berg (2011): The length hierarchy and the gra¬-phematic syllable. Written Language and Literacy 14.2: 275-292. DOI: 10.1075/wll.14. 2.05fuh
Fuhrhop, Nanna & Karsten Schmidt (2014): Die zunehmende Profilierung der Schreibsilbe in der Geschichte des Deutschen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 136.4: 538-568. DOI: 10.1515/bgsl-2014-0047
Kandel, Sonia, Carlos J. Álvarez & Nathalie Vallée (2006): Syllables as processing units in hand-writing production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 32.1: 18-31. DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.32.1.18
Inkelas, Sharon, Keith Johnson, Charles Lee, Emil Minas, George Mulcaire, Gek Yong Keng & To-momi Yuasa (2013): Testing the learnability of writing systems. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 75-89. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. DOI: 10.3765/bls.v39i1.3871
McBride-Chang, Catherine & Robert V. Kail (2002): Cross-cultural similarities in the predictors of reading acquisition. Child Development 73.5: 1392-1407. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8624.00479
Meletis, Dimitrios (2019): Naturalness in scripts and writing systems: Outlining a Natural Grapholinguistics. PhD dissertation, University of Graz.
Primus, Beatrice (2003): Zum Silbenbegriff in der Schrift-, Laut- und Gebärdensprache – Versuch einer mediumübergreifenden Fundierung. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 23.1: 3-55. DOI: 10.1515/zfsw.2003.22.1.3
Röber-Siekmeyer, Christa (2004): Die Berücksichtigung des kindlichen Sprachwissens für den Schrifterwerb. In Hans-Werner Huneke (ed.), Geschriebene Sprache. Strukturen, Erwerb, didaktische Modellbildungen, 129-144. Heidelberg: Mattes.
Will, Udo, Guido Nottbusch & Rüdiger Weingarten (2006): Linguistic units in word typing. Effects of word presentation modes and typing delay. Written Language and Literacy 9.1: 153-176. DOI: 10.1075/wll.9.1.10wil
Well-known typologies of writing systems (Gelb 1952; Daniels 2018; Sampson 2015) are primarily sy... more Well-known typologies of writing systems (Gelb 1952; Daniels 2018; Sampson 2015) are primarily synchronic in nature, but the basic approach is not, however, without inherent quagmires (Joyce 2016). Principally, they include fallacious assumptions about teleological transitions (Gelb 1952) and base their classifications on the dominant level of graphematic representation (i.e., morphemic, syllabic, or phonemic). However, as these levels and their spelling principles (representational mappings) combine in complex ways, in reality, most writing systems are, to varying degrees, mixtures of phono- and morphographic principles.
In order to move beyond dominant (synchronic) spelling principles, writing system typologies need to adopt a more diverse set of criteria (Share & Daniels 2016), which can be organized beneficially under three categories: (a) linguistic fit (match between writing system and language), (b) processing fit (both physiological and cognitive) and (c) sociocultural fit (communicative and social functions) (Meletis 2018). Naturally, such diverse categories interact dynamically and are often in conflict, but, crucially, they can afford valuable insights into the diachronic ‘evolution’ of writing systems.
Our paper elucidates these criteria with observations from both the German and Japanese writing systems. Japanese is a complicated mixture, consisting of morphographic kanji, syllabographic kana, and alphabetic Roman script, and although generally classified as an alphabet, German is also more accurately analyzed as a mixed system, due to its pervasive morphography (Schmidt 2018; Berg 2019). Moreover, their respective grapheme inventories are highly contrastive, and a number of inventory-related criteria have direct implications at various levels of graphematic representation. These, in turn, are of particular significance for many processing factors, such as syllabification and the saliency of syllables (cf. the emergence of the graphematic syllable in German; Fuhrhop & Schmidt 2014).
Of profound relevance to writing systems typology, the diverse criteria explored in this paper are particularly promising for cross-linguistic investigations of writing systems and for illuminating their diachronic changes.
References:
Berg, K. (2019). Die Graphematik der Morpheme im Deutschen und Englischen. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Daniels, P. T. (2018). An exploration of writing. Bristol: Equinox.
Fuhrhop, N. & K. Schmidt (2014). Die zunehmende Profilierung der Schreibsilbe in der Geschichte des Deutschen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 136(4), 538-568.
Gelb, I. J. (1952): A study of writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Joyce, T. (2016). Writing systems and scripts. In A. Rocci & L. de Saussure (eds.), Verbal communication (287–308). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Meletis, D. (2018). What is natural in writing? Prolegomena to a Natural Grapholinguistics. Written Language and Literacy 21(1), 52-88.
Sampson, G. (2015). Writing systems: a linguistic introduction (2nd ed.). Bristol: Equinox.
Share, D. L. & P. T. Daniels (2016). Aksharas, alphasyllabaries, abugidas, alphabets and orthographic depth: Reflections on Rimzhim, Katz and Fowler (2014). Writing Systems Research 8(1), 17-31.
Schmidt, K. (2018). Phonographie und Morphographie im Deutschen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Obwohl die Schriftlinguistik ein aktuell aufstrebender Teilbereich der Sprachwissenschaft ist, bl... more Obwohl die Schriftlinguistik ein aktuell aufstrebender Teilbereich der Sprachwissenschaft ist, bleibt eine Schrifttheorie, die die Struktur von Schriftsystemen nicht nur beschreibt, sondern auch danach strebt, sie zu erklären, bis heute ein Desideratum. In diesem Vortrag wird erläutert, wie Prämissen der linguistischen Natürlichkeitstheorie bei der Konstruktion einer erklärenden Schrifttheorie helfen können. So kann die materiell orientierte Natürliche Phonologie (Donegan & Stampe 2009), die sich mit physiologischen Prozessen beschäftigt, die die Artikulation und Perzeption gesprochener Sprache erleichtern, eine analoge Natürliche Graphetik prägen, die die materielle Ebene von Schrift sowie der damit assoziierten Schreib- und Leseprozesse behandelt. Die Prämissen der semiotisch fundierten Natürlichen Morphologie (Dressler & Kilani-Schoch 2016), welche die Eigenschaften der semiotischen Struktur sprachlicher Zeichen und deren Ein-fluss auf die kognitive Verarbeitung untersucht, können die Eckpfeiler einer Natürlichen Gra-phematik darstellen, die die Struktur schriftlicher Zeichen – u. a. Graphemen als semiotischen Verbindungen von visuellen signantia und sprachlichen signata – in den Fokus rückt.
Mit diesem natürlichkeitstheoretischen Fundament kann erklärt werden, warum Schriftsysteme so aussehen, wie sie heute aussehen. Erklärungen werden dabei weiter unterteilt in drei Bereiche: linguistische, verarbeitungstechnische und soziokulturelle. Linguistisch kann untersucht werden, wie Schriftsysteme als sekundäre, visuelle semiotische Systeme sich dem jeweiligen zugrunde liegenden Sprachsystem (als primärem semiotischen System) anpassen. Verarbeitungstechnisch gilt, was Dehaene (2009) konstatiert: Schrift ist als Erfindung zu jung, als dass Menschen sich evolutionär an sie hätten anpassen können, also war es umgekehrt – Schrift passte sich unserer Biologie und Kognition an. Drittens bleibt für Schrift als Kulturtechnik die hochrelevante soziokulturelle Dimension. Schriftsysteme sind geprägt durch die Bedürfnisse von literaten Sprachgemeinschaften. Sie erlauben es, sich als Individuum oder Gruppe sozial zu präsentieren, zu positionieren etc. Diese drei Dimensionen spiegeln sich in der diachronen Ent-wicklung von Schrift sowie ihrer synchronen Struktur wider.
In diesem Vortrag werden die Grundpfeiler einer natürlichen Schriftlinguistik sowie die drei genannten Erklärungsdimensionen anhand von Beispielen aus den diversesten Schriftsystemen – Deutsch, Chinesisch, Thailändisch, Arabisch, Koreanisch – vorgestellt und illustriert.
Dehaene, Stanislas (2009): Reading in the brain: the new science of how we read. London: Penguin.
Donegan, Patricia & David Stampe (2009): Hypotheses of Natural Phonology. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45.1: 1-31. DOI: 10.2478/v10010-009-0002-x
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Marianne Kilani-Schoch (2016): Natural Morphology. In Andrew Hippisley & Gregory Stump (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology, 356-389. Cambridge: CUP.
Even as Saussure’s dogma of the “tyranny of writing” recedes farther into the past, writing syste... more Even as Saussure’s dogma of the “tyranny of writing” recedes farther into the past, writing systems remain a subject at the margins of linguistics. Although much has been accomplished in the interdisciplinary area of writing systems research, or grapholinguistics, most major contributions to the field are of exclusively descriptive nature. As a result, Watt’s (1998:118) observations are still true today: there exists no theory of writing that can explain “why each […] writing system is the way it is, instead of some other way, and why all such systems have in common what they have in common”. The reasons for this are that valuable grapholinguistic findings from the various disciplines interested in writing – aside from linguistics, these are history, psychology, pedagogy, and many others – often fail to reference one another and are not embedded in a larger context. An overarching theoretical framework remains a desideratum, as do shared concepts and terminology that would allow the comparison of typologically diverse writing systems. For precisely these reasons, endeavors such as a comparison of the Chinese and German writing systems remain unfeasible. Provocative claims such as “some writing systems are better than others” (Rogers, 1995:31) are, against this background, ultimately untestable.
Based on Meletis (2018), this talk introduces the core tenets of Natural Graphematics as an explanatory theoretical framework that makes possible the comparison of writing systems. It is positioned in the framework of Naturalness Theory and modeled after its subbranch of Natural Morphology. In Natural Morphology (Dressler et al., 1987), the semiotic structure of signs is assumed to have a bearing on how they are cognitively processed by humans, with structures that are cognitively processed with less effort being termed natural, giving the approach its name. As writing systems are semiotic systems linking the visual units of scripts (= signifiers) with linguistic units (= signifieds), the semiotic parameters of Natural Morphology can be fruitfully transferred to graphematics. Accordingly, parameters such as transparency (a grapheme is transparent if it only corresponds with one linguistic unit, e.g. German <f> only corresponds to /f/) prove to be useful categories for the description and comparison of the graphematic module of writing systems. In this talk, the parameters of iconicity, diagrammaticity, indexicality, transparency, compositional transparency, positional transparency, and figure—ground will be presented and illustrated with examples from a variety of diverse writing systems.
While the investigation of how these parameters are reflected in different writing systems descriptively evaluates their linguistic fit, i.e. how well they fit their respective languages, in a next step, the processing fit of these parameters can be assessed with the help of external evidence such as data from literacy acquisition and the history of writing. Here, the central question reads: How do the structural features of writing systems affect their processing by humans? The processing fit also gives Natural Graphematics its explanatory force, as it does not stop at describing structures, but strives to explain how human pressure has shaped them and how they affect humans. In sum, taken together, the naturalness parameters and their linguistic and processing fits introduced in this talk offer instruments for the evaluation of writing systems. This presents a remarkable step in the development of a theory of writing.
DRESSLER, WOLFGANG U., WILLI MAYERTHALER, OSWALD PANAGL, and WOLFGANG U. WURZEL. 1987. Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
MELETIS, DIMITRIOS. 2018. What is natural in writing? Prolegomena to a Natural Grapholinguistics. Written Language and Literacy 21:52-88.
ROGERS, HENRY. 1995. Optimal orthographies. In Scripts and literacy: reading and learning to read alphabets, syllabaries and characters, edited by INSUP TAYLOR, and DAVID R. OLSON, 31-43. Dordrecht: Springer.
WATT, W. C. 1998. The old-fashioned way. Semiotica 122:99-138.
Literate communities feel strongly about orthography: they claim ownership of ‘their’ orthogra-ph... more Literate communities feel strongly about orthography: they claim ownership of ‘their’ orthogra-phies and demand the right of co-determination. This is evident in highly emotional debates sur-rounding orthographic reforms (cf. Johnson 2005).
A context in which it becomes strikingly apparent that orthography is a form of social action (cf. Jaffe 2012; Sebba 2007) is social media. Frequently, written utterances on Facebook etc. that include orthographic mistakes are corrected by others (who are sometimes referred to as gram-mar or spelling nazis). In numerous cases, this is done not neutrally but in a manner that osten-tatiously degrades the person who made the mistake. I call this phenomenon orthographic shaming. It is characterized by the fact that people interpret linguistic knowledge, in this case the knowledge of orthographic norms, as a source of power: knowing something others do not – and pointing this out to them – validates their superiority.
In this talk, I present the results of a study that employs a combination of three methods to in-vestigate orthographic shaming in German: (1) a qualitative analysis of 100 correction samples including the respective contexts on Facebook, (2) semi-structured oral interviews with 21 par-ticipants regarding their attitudes towards orthography, mistakes, and orthographic shaming, and (3) written interviews with ‘orthographic shamers.’
In the analysis, I focus on the pragmatic aspects of orthographic shaming. Informed by previous studies on speech acts in social media (cf. Carr, Schrock & Dauterman 2012), speech acts with-in orthographic shaming comments and the reactions to them are identified. Conclusions are drawn as to the pragmatic behavior surrounding orthographic shaming as well as the attitudes towards this behavior. Ultimately, the phenomenon of orthographic shaming is an expression of a negotiation of power and normativity and a gradual change of discussion culture.
References
Carr, Caleb T., David B. Schrock & Patricia Dauterman (2012): Speech acts within Facebook status messages. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31(2): 176-196.
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (et al.) (eds.) (2012): Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, iden-tity and power. Berlin: DeGruyter.
Johnson, Sally (2005): Spelling trouble? Language, ideology, and the reform of German or-thography. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Sebba, Mark (2007): Spelling and society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge: CUP.
There exists no model of writing that can handle the typological diversity of the world’s writing... more There exists no model of writing that can handle the typological diversity of the world’s writing systems. Thus, different studies presuppose different conceptualizations of writing, becoming incomparable in the process.
A problem inherent in the modeling of writing is the question of the relationship between language, speech, and writing. In this context, predominantly Eurocentric efforts to define a graphematics autonomous from phonology have been misguided. This becomes evident when the approach is extended to non-phonographic writing systems, which yields the following question: if writing in morphographic systems such as Chinese is clearly dependent on mor-phology, why should writing in phonographic systems not be dependent on phonology, which is vehemently rejected by autonomists?
In this talk, I argue that writing and speech are two modalities of an abstract, amodal lan-guage system. What characterizes them and renders them so distinct is their materiality – visual on the one hand, acoustic on the other. They are not dependent on each other, but they are equal-ly dependent on abstract linguistic levels such as phonology and morphology. Crucially, pho-nology does not equal speech, but is interpreted amodally, offering minimal lexical contrasts that can be either spoken or written. Thus, while writing is always independent of speech, it can be dependent on phonology. Systems such as Chinese, however, can bypass this (direct) connec-tion to phonology and relate to morphological units instead. Consequently, minimal lexical con-trasts cannot be expressed in these systems. Ultimately, what has been termed grapheme in the autonomous approach and defined in analogy to the phoneme is exposed as an alphabetocentric concept not viable for a universal model of writing.
Using a variety of examples from diverse writing systems, I propose such a model that ac-counts for typological diversity and offers both graphetic and graphematic concepts and termi-nology for the description and comparison of historical and contemporary writing systems.
Literate communities feel strongly about orthography: they claim ownership of ‘their’ orthographi... more Literate communities feel strongly about orthography: they claim ownership of ‘their’ orthographies and demand the right of co-determination. This is evident in highly emotional debates surrounding orthographic reforms (cf. Johnson 2005).
A context in which it becomes strikingly apparent that orthography is a form of social action (cf. Jaffe 2012; Sebba 2007) is social media. Frequently, written utterances on Facebook etc. that include orthographic mistakes are corrected by others. In numerous cases, this is done not neutrally but in a manner that ostentatiously degrades the person who made the mistake. I call this phenomenon orthographic shaming. It is characterized by the fact that people interpret linguistic knowledge, in this case the knowledge of orthographic norms, as a source of power: knowing something others do not – and pointing it out to them – validates their superiority.
In this talk, I discuss the results of a study that employs a combination of three methods to investigate orthographic shaming in German: (1) an analysis of 100 correction samples including the respective contexts on Facebook, (2) interviews with people of different backgrounds regarding their attitudes towards orthography, mistakes, and orthographic shaming, and (3) an internet survey based on Likert scales and open questions investigating the severity of different types of mistakes as well as possible reactions to them.
Questions that are addressed include: What criteria must be met for a correction to count as orthographic shaming? What are the contexts in which this phenomenon occurs? Which mistakes are most often corrected – is there a scale of severity? What are the motivations for people to engage in orthographic shaming? What are the reactions to orthographic shaming? And finally, what are general attitudes towards (German) orthography?
References:
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (et al.) (eds.) (2012): Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, identity and power. Berlin: DeGruyter.
Johnson, Sally (2005): Spelling trouble? Language, ideology, and the reform of German orthography. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Sebba, Mark (2007): Spelling and society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge: CUP.
Der Terminus Orthographie wird auch heute noch häufig als Synonym des deskriptiven Begriffs Schri... more Der Terminus Orthographie wird auch heute noch häufig als Synonym des deskriptiven Begriffs Schriftsystem verwendet, vor allem in englischsprachiger Literatur, in der regelmäßig undifferenziert von orthography die Rede ist. Diese Verwendung ist jedoch inkorrekt, worauf nicht zuletzt das griechische ὀρθός orthós ‚aufrecht, richtig‘ hinweist; in einer Orthographie geht es nicht darum, wie geschrieben wird, sondern wie richtig geschrieben wird. Anders als bei einem Schriftsystem handelt es sich bei einer Orthographie also um ein präskriptives, oft wesentlich von äußeren, nicht-linguistischen Faktoren beeinflusstes Phänomen, das in der modernen Schriftsystemtheorie (vgl. Neef 2015) als optionales Modul eines Schriftsystems gilt. Im Wesentlichen dient es dazu, ein Schriftsystem zu standardisieren und zu normieren.
Der euro- und alphabetozentrische Fokus der Schriftlinguistik und -forschung (vgl. Ehlich 2007; Share 2014) hat dazu geführt, dass der Diversität von Orthographie(n) bisher wenig bis gar keine Beachtung geschenkt wurde. Coulmas (1996: 379f.) nennt beispielweise Phonem-Graphem-Korrespondenzen, Wort- und Silbentrennung, Groß- und Kleinschreibung sowie die Schreibung von Lehnwörtern als zentrale Aspekte der orthographischen Normierung alphabetischer Schriftsysteme. Im Zuge eines Vergleichs von Schriftsystemen, wie ihn die komparative Schriftlinguistik (Meletis i.E.; Weingarten 2011) vornimmt, wird jedoch deutlich, dass nur wenige dieser Aspekte orthographieübergreifend von Bedeutung sind; vielmehr unterliegen andere, spezifische Bereiche der jeweiligen Schriftsysteme orthographischen Normen.
Dieser Vortrag behandelt anhand von zahlreichen Beispielen die Frage, wie orthographische „Regeln“ und „Rechtschreibfehler“ in Systemen wie dem Chinesischen, dem Arabischen, dem Thailändischen, dem Japanischen, dem Koreanischen und dem Hebräischen aussehen; auf diese Weise wird die Diversität von Orthographie(n) bzw. orthographischen Modulen beleuchtet. Gleichzeitig wird untersucht, inwiefern „orthographische Universalien“ bzw. universale Tendenzen existieren. Ebenfalls werden die Akteur_innen und Interessensvertreter_innen thematisiert, die an der Gestaltung einer Orthographie teilhaben: Wer sind sie und was sind ihre Motivationen? Der Vortrag schließt mit einem Fazit, in dem Vorschläge für die zukünftige Orthographieforschung gemacht werden und für eine differenziertere Schriftlinguistik plädiert wird.
Grapheme is a controversial and ambiguous concept within grapholinguistics. Numerous researchers ... more Grapheme is a controversial and ambiguous concept within grapholinguistics. Numerous researchers have argued against it (cf. Daniels 1991), some for it (cf. Herrick 1994), and many have not employed it at all (cf. Neef 2015). If it is addressed, a distinction is commonly made between two contrasting conceptions: one assumes that it is the main function of graphemes to refer to phonemes, while the other argues that written language – including the grapheme – is (relatively) independent from speech and should be analyzed in its own right (cf. Bazell 1956; Kohrt 1986). However, this simplistic juxtaposition seemingly fails to grasp the complexity of the matter and entails a number of conceptual and terminological problems. In my presentation I will aim to address and discuss these issues.
I will argue that the misleading reductionist analogy between phonology/phonetics and graphematics/graphetics as well as the lack of commitment to one of the views listed above have contributed to a false hierarchizing within grapholinguistics. This has e. g. led to the ambiguity of terms such as allography, referring both to material (|a| and |ɑ|) as well as functional variation (<ph> and <f> for /f/). Therefore, a consistent distinction between graphetic and graphematic units seems inevitable: by postulating a central graphetic unit termed basic shape (cf. Rezec 2013), the grapheme is relieved of its duty of being both functional and material.
Furthermore, I will address the challenge of finding a conception of grapheme that holds across various types of writing systems (cf. Lockwood 2001). Can e. g. Chinese and German graphemes be compared? How does comparison inform our understanding of the grapheme? And can the grapheme further our understanding of what is at the core of all writing systems?
I will close my talk with refined terminological suggestions for grapholinguistics and a possible answer to the question if there is indeed a need for the concept of grapheme.
References
Bazell, C. E. (1956): The grapheme. Litera 3, 43–46.
Daniels, Peter T. (1991): Is a structural graphemics possible? LACUS Forum XVIII, 528–537.
Herrick, Earl M. (1994): Of course a structural graphemics is possible! LACUS Forum XXI, 413–424.
Kohrt, Manfred (1986): The term ‘grapheme’ in the history and theory of linguistics. In Gerhard Augst (ed.), New trends in graphemics and orthography, 80–96. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Lockwood, David G. (2001): Phoneme and grapheme – How parallel can they be? LACUS Forum XXVII, 307–316.
Neef, Martin (2015): Writing systems as modular objects: proposals for theory design in grapholinguistics. Open Linguistics 1, 708–721.
Rezec, Oliver (2013): Ein differenzierteres Strukturmodell des deutschen Schriftsystems. Linguistische Berichte 234, 227–254.
Uploads
Talks by Dimitrios Meletis
However, the existence of orthographic standardization cannot be captured by a simplifying dichotomy, with systems like English classified as unregulated and systems like German as officially regulated; instead, there is a whole variety of different orthographies that serve as a normative benchmark in writing systems, rendering their respective users aware of the (in)correctness of scribal practices. In this paper, such different types of orthography will be described with the help of sever-al criteria that form the basis of a preliminary typology. In systems that are equipped with one, an orthography becomes a structural matter; however, it always originates as a social phenomenon, which is echoed by the predominantly sociolinguistic nature of the following criteria (cf. also CA-HILL 2014, HINTON 2014):
— Natural vs. artificial captures whether the orthographic conventions in a writing system have de-veloped naturally, through implicit negotiations among users during the prolonged continued use of the writing system (cf. MIHM 2016 for premodern orthographies), to become a ‘phenomenon of the third kind’ (cf. KELLER 2014), or whether they are artificial in the sense of having either been (1) implemented for an existing and established writing system without consideration of the actual use of that system (whether said system already had an orthographic standardization or not), or (2) im-plemented immediately during/after the creation of a new writing system, which has thus never been in use without a standardization.
— Regulated vs. unregulated describes, in a narrow sense, whether an orthographic standardization is officially regulated by an external stakeholder of linguistic policy (such as the Council for German Orthography in the case of German orthography) or not (such as English orthographies; cf. also KARAN 2014).
— Codified vs. uncodified reflects whether orthographic conventions are externally and explicitly cod-ified as rules – whether these are officially regulated or not. Types of codifications include rule-books, guidelines, and dictionaries. Notably, orthographies can be unregulated but codified (such as English orthographies, for which there exist dictionaries with – strictly speaking – only nonofficial status).
— Original vs. reformed is a subcriterion assessing whether a regulated codified orthography exists in its first, i.e., original form, or whether it has been reformed, i.e., re-codified, at least once.
— Community involvement vs. no community involvement (or a continuum of bottom-up vs. top-down standardization): In a loose sense, this criterion pertains to the involvement of users in the (implicit or explicit, gradual or onetime) establishment of orthographic conventions, their codifica-tion as rules, and their potential reform, i.e., bottom-up processes of standardization. In a narrow sense, it describes whether community members are involved in the (initial) explicit regulation and possibly codification of orthographic rules (cf. BOW 2013, PAGE 2013 for case studies) – which is the case mostly in the context of literacy development (cf. LÜPKE 2011, the contributions in CA-HILL/RICE 2014), i.e., the creation of new writing systems from scratch.
— As the first of two criteria that are structural in nature, variable vs. nonvariable establishes a con-tinuum capturing the degree of a writing system’s graphematic variability. It thus determines the possibility of (licensed or unlicensed) graphematic variation and with it, the expression of social (non-denotative) meaning and creativity etc. in writing. The Japanese writing system, for example, often affords multiple ways of writing the same word (or, more generally, utterance) without a devi-ance from the norm automatically being perceived as strictly ‘incorrect’ (cf. JOYCE/MASUDA 2019). It is crucial whether these variable parts of a writing system are unregulated, as there may exist graphematically highly variable writing systems which are strictly regulated and thus do not afford the same possibilities for ‘correct’ graphematic variation.
— Motivated vs. arbitrary is used to evaluate whether orthographic conventions/rules are based on the graphematics of the writing system, i.e., its internal systematics and its actual usage, in which case they are motivated, or whether they are arbitrary and based on other (external) considerations.
It is important to emphasize that this list is, of course, non-exhaustive. However, the proposed crite-ria allow categorizing and comparing different types of orthographic standardization. This can (fi-nally) further our understanding of the status that diverse kinds of norms assume in different writing systems. Notably, linguistic norms arguably play a more prominent role in the written modality than in the spoken one – they possibly even originate in writing and literacy (cf. MĬKIL¬LÄH¬DE/LEP¬PÄ-NEN/IT¬KON¬EN 2019 for normativity in language).
In this paper, not only the listed criteria will be presented – along with examples of writing systems and their orthographies to which they apply in various combinations – but a related im-portant question that will be raised is what bearing this typology has on central normative concepts such as ‘orthographic rule’ and ‘orthographic mistake’. Specifically, differences in the perception of prescriptivity will be highlighted – what to members of one literate community may be a rule (and a deviation from it a mistake) may for members of another community merely be a convention (and a ‘deviation’ from it variation). Fleshing out the basis of grapholinguistic normativity is expected to not only improve our understanding of writing and literacy practices, but pragmatics – and meta-pragmatic beliefs – regarding the linguistic and communicative behavior of members of literate communities in general. Furthermore, it is relevant to applied fields such as literacy development and the reform of existing orthographies.
References
BERG, KRISTIAN & MARK ARONOFF. 2017. Self-organization in the spelling of English suffixes: The emergence of culture out of anarchy. Language 93(1). 37–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2017.0000
BERG, KRISTIAN & MARK ARONOFF. 2018. Further evidence for self-organization in English spelling. Language 94(1). e48–e53. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2018.0013
BOW, CATHERINE. 2013. Community-based orthography development in four Western Zambian languages. Writ-ing Systems Research 5(1). 73–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/17586801.2012.747427
CAHILL, MICHAEL. 2014. Non-linguistic factors in orthographies. In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Develop-ing orthographies for unwritten languages, 9–25. Dallas: SIL International.
CAHILL, MICHAEL & KEREN RICE (eds.). 2014. Developing orthographies for unwritten languages. Dallas: SIL In-ternational.
DÜRSCHEID, CHRISTA. 2016. Einführung in die Schriftlinguistik, 5th edn. (UTB 3740). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
HINTON, LEANNE. 2014. Orthography wars. In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Developing or¬tho¬graphies for unwritten languages, 139–168. Dallas: SIL International.
JOYCE, TERRY & HISASHI MASUDA. 2019. On the notions of orthography and graphematic representation from the perspective of the Japanese writing system. Written Language & Literacy 22(2). 247–279. https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00028.joy
KARAN, ELKE. 2014. Standardization: What’s the hurry? In Michael Cahill & Keren Rice (eds.), Developing or-thographies for unwritten languages, 107–138. Dallas: SIL International.
KELLER, RUDI. 2014. Sprachwandel: von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache, 4th edn. (UTB, 1567). Tübingen: Francke.
LÜPKE, FRIEDERIKE. 2011. Orthography development. In Peter Austoin & Julia Sallabank (eds.), Hand-book of en-dangered languages, 312–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975981.016
MÄKILLÄHDE, ALEKSI, VILLE LEPPÄNEN & ESA ITKONEN. 2019. Norms and normativity in language and linguistics: Basic concepts and contextualization. In Aleksi Mäkillähde, Ville Leppänen & Esa Itkonen (eds.), Norms and normativity in language and linguistics, 1–28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.209.01mak
MELETIS, DIMITRIOS. 2020. The nature of writing. A theory of grapholinguistics (Grapholinguistics and Its Applica-tions 3). Brest: Fluxus Éditions. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-meletis
MIHM, AREND. 2016. Zur Theorie der vormodernen Orthographien: Straßburger Schreibsysteme als Erkenntnis-grundlage. Sprachwissenschaft 41(3–4). 271–309.
NEEF, MARTIN. 2015. Writing systems as modular objects: Proposals for theory design in grapholinguistics. Open Linguistics 1. 708–721. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2015-0026
PAGE, CHRISTINA J. 2013. A new orthography in an unfamiliar script: A case study in participatory engagement strategies. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34(5). 459–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2013.783035
These start already at the structural level, as the restricted focus on the relation between writing and language results in a disregard of systematic structural features that are intrinsic to writing systems, i.e., not determined by their relation to language. These include, for example, allography, i.e., systematic variation of variant units in writing, or graphotactics, the rules of how units of writing may combine to form larger units (such as written words, sentences, etc.). Notably, a restriction to structure dismisses paramount questions concerning the use of writing systems, e.g., how they are processed and used for communication, bringing to the fore psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Potential criteria for possible psycholinguistic typologies of writing include, for example, spacing between graphemes or written words, or the visual complexity exhibited by the script used for a writing system. A candidate for a sociolinguistic typology is the degree of normativity and prescriptivism characterizing a literate culture, which is established, among other things, by asking if and how the writing system in question is orthographically regulated and how this affects users’ literacy practices and ideologies pertaining to writing.
Since, in a comprehensive and integrated theory of writing, a writing system must always simultaneously be considered as a system with its own idiosyncratic features, a semiotic system relating to a given language, a graphic medium that must be physiologically and cognitively processed, and a communication tool and a cultural technique embedded in a given context and culture, structural, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives arguably should never be adopted completely divorced from each other (cf. Meletis 2020). This talk aims not only to present different structural and use-based typologies of writing that go beyond those brought forth by ‘traditional’ writing system typology but also to show how they are connected and interact with each other and, importantly, how this can increase our know¬ledge of the fundamental nature of writing.
REFERENCES
Joyce, Terry & Dimitrios Meletis (in press): Alternative criteria for writing system typology. Cross-linguistic observations from the German and Japanese writing systems. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft Special Issue.
Meletis, Dimitrios (2020): The nature of writing. A theory of grapholinguistics (= Grapholinguistics and Its Applications; 3). Brest: Fluxus Editions. DOI: 10.36824/2020-meletis.
Despite graphotactics being a core feature of writing systems, research on it—especially comparative—is scarce. This talk aims to systematize various types of restrictions, including, at the subsegmental level, favored positions of semantic and phonological components inside Chinese characters that “determine whether the character is legal or not” (Ho/Ng/Ng 2003: 853). As for larger written units, in many abu¬gi¬das such as Devanāgarī or Thai, secondary vowel graphemes occur in specific positions around consonants, with some being misaligned in appearing before consonants despite following them in speech (cf. Winskel 2009). A well-known length-related example is the ‘three-letter-rule’ in English: content words must consist of at least three letters (distinguishing <buy> from <by>).
Crucially, graphotactic regularities are independent of external orthographic regulation and thus not explicit, codified rules but intrinsic to writing systems as self-regulating systems and thus part of users’ implicit knowledge. They rely fundamentally on a two-dimensional spatiality that departs from the linear temporality of speech. This makes graphotactics central in arguing that writing systems are indeed systematic in nature.
References
Berg, Kristian (2016): Graphemic analysis and the spoken language bias. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 388. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00388
Ho, Connie S.-H., Ting-Ting Ng & Wing-Kin Ng (2003): A ‘radical’ approach to reading development in Chinese: the role of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals. Journal of Literacy Research 35.3: 849-878. DOI: 10.1207/s15548430jlr3503_3
McCawley, James D. (1994): Some graphotactic constraints. In W. C. Watt (ed.), Writing systems and cognition (= Neuropsychology and Cognition, 6), 115-127. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8285-8_7
Winskel, Heather (2009): Reading in Thai: the case of misaligned vowels. Reading and Writing 22.1: 1-24. DOI: 10.1007/s11145-007-9100-z
In a recent pilot study 21 semi-structured interviews with Austrian university students were conducted to investigate attitudes on (i) orthographic regulation, (ii) deviances from the written standard and denigrating public corrections of mistakes (so-called ‘orthographic shaming’), as well as (iii) changes of orthography, i.e. spelling reforms and involved stakeholders.
Many of the participants’ utterances, e.g. “Every time that I’m writing somewhere, I’m writing, and therefore it has to be correct”, were entrenched in normativity and (self-)prescriptivism, the most important aspects of which will be traced in this talk, as a metapragmatic discourse analysis of the interviews shows that in a literate community whose writing is orthographically regulated, (1) normativity appears to be inherent to literacy practices, which are strongly affected by standard language ideologies, (2) knowledge of various norms pertaining to the written standard is considered social/cultural capital and is instrumentalized in the establishment and reinforcement of hierarchies of power, and that, generally, (3) the public’s nuanced attitudes towards orthography and literacy prove invaluable in examining the interaction between the status of prescriptive orthographies as central cornerstones of linguistic policy and everyday literacy practices.
Dickinson, Jennifer A. (2015): Introduction: Language ideologies and writing systems. Pragmatics 25.4: 507–516.
Heyd, Theresa (2014): Folk-linguistic landscapes: The visual semiotics of digital enregisterment. Language in Society 43: 489–514.
Johnson, Sally (2002): On the origin of linguistic norms: orthography, ideology and the first con-stitutional challenge to the 1996 reform of German. Language in Society 31: 549-576.
Weth, Constanze & Kasper Juffermans (2018): Introduction: The tyranny of writing in language and society. In Constanze Weth & Kasper Juffermans (eds.), The tyranny of writing: Ideologies of the written word, 1–19. London, New York: Bloomsbury.
This talk aims to contribute to a first historiographic account by discussing and contextualizing the main points of three disputes centering on issues of writing and encapsulating the most pressing questions the discipline studies to this day.
In the first dispute, prolific writing researcher Peter T. Daniels proclaims – in a LACUS Forum talk – that “[t]here cannot be a structural graphemics” (Daniels 1991: 528) since writing systems cannot be treated with the same concepts as language. He argues that writing is merely a representation of language with no systematics of its own, thus rejecting the possibility of concepts such as grapheme. In a response, Earl M. Herrick (Herrick 1994) takes the opposite stance: writing is a system of its own and has idiosyncratic features that can only be captured in an independent grapholinguistic analysis. In two talks/papers as well as two additional replies, the two scholars adhere to views referred to as the dependency view and the autonomy view, respectively, reproducing an argument with a long tradition in German grapholinguistics, the crucial questions of which are being discussed to this day as they have a bearing on the very raison d’être of grapholinguistics as its own discipline.
In the second argument, Herbert E. Brekle attacks semiotician W. C. Watt’s (1994) view of the diachronic development of writing as a systematic evolutionary process not unsimilar to that of language. Specifically, Brekle (1994) criticizes four evolutionary ‘forces’ assumed by Watt: homogenization, facilitation, heterogenization, and inertia, addressing not only their (un)consciousness but also their cognitive reality as well as the problematics of the teleology they imply. Additionally, Brekle laments that vital factors of economical, technical, and social nature remain unaccounted for in Watt’s framework.
The third dispute starts with Primus’ (2004) claim of form-function-correlations between visual features of Roman letters and phonological features of the phonemes they represent, which is forcefully attacked by Rezec (2010). This argument touches on the core of the question of how writing is approached as a subject and the systematics one attempts or expects to find in it. This links it to the first two arguments in that it addresses whether writing is merely a representational system or its own system as well as whether, in its diachronic development, iconic relations between the visual and the linguistic such as proposed by Primus could have been established.
Even though they represent only three points in a gradual development, these disputes are strikingly representative of contemporary discourses in grapholinguistics. By contextualizing them and highlighting their relevance for the discipline, this talk is a crucial contribution to a much-needed grapholinguistic historiography.
BREKLE, HERBERT E. (1994): Some thoughts on a historico-genetic theory of the lettershapes of our alphabet. In W. C. WATT (ed.), Writing systems and cognition, 129-139. Dordrecht: Springer.
DANIELS, PETER T. (1991): Is a structural graphemics possible? LACUS Forum 18:528-537.
HERRICK, EARL M. (1994): Of course a structural graphemics is possible! LACUS Forum 21:413-424.
PRIMUS, BEATRICE (2004): A featural analysis of the Modern Roman Alphabet. Written Language and Literacy 7.2:235-274.
REZEC, OLIVER (2010): Der vermeintliche Zusammenhang zwischen Buchstabenformen und Lautwerten. Erwiderung auf einige Thesen von B. Primus. Linguistische Berichte 223:343-366.
WATT, W. C. (1994): Introduction. In W. C. WATT (ed.), Writing systems and cognition, 89-114. Dordrecht: Springer.
The ample evidence pointing to the syllable as a central grapholinguistic unit starts at the structural level: Aside from (parts of) writing systems in which the syllable is the unmarked basic unit of representation, such as the Japanese kana syllabaries or, indirectly, the morpho(syllabo)graphic Chinese writing system, syllabic structures are also reflected in alphabets, i.e. segmental phonographic writing systems. For German and English, for example, a so-called graphematic syllable has been postulated based on the observation that syllable boundaries are visually marked in writing by letters with descenders and ascenders, such as |bel| in German <Gabel> ‘fork’ (cf. Fuhrhop & Buchmann 2009; Fuhrhop, Buchmann & Berg 2011). This visual demarcation of syllables, interestingly, also holds for alphabets using scripts other than Roman such as Greek and Armenian (cf. Meletis 2019). Strikingly, it has been shown that some letters with ascenders or descenders such as |y| were diachronically ousted from the graphematic syllable nucleus precisely because they were gradually functionalized as visual markers of syllable boundaries (cf. Fuhrhop & Schmidt 2014). This begs the question of why and how such a development proceeded. In light of the claim that humans did not evolve to better process writing, a relatively recent invention, but that inversely, writing was gradually ‘changed’ by humans to suit and repurpose existing cognitive abilities (cf. Dehaene 2009), the focus shifts to processing as the central dimension for an inquiry of the syllable’s relevance.
While (segmental) phonological awareness might only be constituted by the acquisition of a segmental writing system which either makes phonological segments accessible or actually constructs them in the first place (cf. Davidson 2019), awareness of the phonological syllable has been found to be more robust and to exist earlier (cf. McBride-Chang & Kail 2002), suggesting that the syllable is not only central in phylogeny, but also in ontogeny. Accordingly, in literacy instruction, for alphabets such as German, methods based on syllables (such as Röber-Siekmeyer 2004) are gaining currency. Fittingly, Inkelas et al. (2013), in their study on the ‘learnability of writing systems’, found that graphemes representing syllables are acquired more easily than graphemes representing segments. Additional experimental evidence suggests that the syllable also plays a crucial role in production. For example, Kandel, Álvarez & Vallée (2006) found that in handwriting, intergrapheme intervals were longer at syllable boundaries than intrasyllabically: the interval between the graphemes in the sequence <gn>, which is always intrasyllabic in French (such as in <consi.gner>) and intersyllabic in Spanish (<consig.nar>), was shorter in French than in Spanish, and not only for monolingual writers of these respective languages, but also for bilingual French-Spanish writers, who systematically produced a shorter interval when writing French. For typing, Will, Nottbusch & Weingarten (2006) showed that inter-keystroke intervals were longer at syllable boundaries than within syllables, implying that syllables are relevant for the motor system.
Evidently, both the structure of writing systems and their processing by writers and readers imply that the syllable is somehow special. On the basis of the cited evidence above, this talk aims to discuss a number of questions: (1) Is the salience of the phonological syllable universal or mediated by the specific syllable structure/phonotactics of given languages? (2) Given the efforts of – mostly German – grapholinguists to define written units independently of units of speech and/or language, do there exist independent ‘syllabic’ structures in writing (cf. Primus 2003)? How are they similar to phonological syllables and how do they diverge from them in different types of writing systems? Finally, preliminary answers to these questions are integrated into the larger question of how writing and speech relate to one another to further our knowledge about the nature of writing and to refine existing models of writing.
References
Daniels, Peter T. (1992): The syllabic origin of writing and the segmental origin of the alphabet. In Pamela Downing, Susan D. Lima & Michael Noonan (eds.), The linguistics of literacy (= Ty-pological Studies in Language, 21), 83-110. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/tsl.21.10dan
Daniels, Peter T. (2017): Writing systems. In Mark Aronoff & Janie Rees-Miller (eds.), The handbook of linguistics, 2nd edition, 75-94. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781119072 256.ch5
Davidson, Andrew (2019): Writing: the re-construction of language. Language Sciences 72: 134-149. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2018.09.004
Dehaene, Stanislas (2009): Reading in the brain: the new science of how we read. London: Penguin.
Fuhrhop, Nanna & Franziska Buchmann (2009): Die Längenhierarchie: Zum Bau der graphematischen Silbe. Linguistische Berichte 218: 127-155.
Fuhrhop, Nanna, Franziska Buchmann & Kristian Berg (2011): The length hierarchy and the gra¬-phematic syllable. Written Language and Literacy 14.2: 275-292. DOI: 10.1075/wll.14. 2.05fuh
Fuhrhop, Nanna & Karsten Schmidt (2014): Die zunehmende Profilierung der Schreibsilbe in der Geschichte des Deutschen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 136.4: 538-568. DOI: 10.1515/bgsl-2014-0047
Kandel, Sonia, Carlos J. Álvarez & Nathalie Vallée (2006): Syllables as processing units in hand-writing production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 32.1: 18-31. DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.32.1.18
Inkelas, Sharon, Keith Johnson, Charles Lee, Emil Minas, George Mulcaire, Gek Yong Keng & To-momi Yuasa (2013): Testing the learnability of writing systems. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 75-89. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. DOI: 10.3765/bls.v39i1.3871
McBride-Chang, Catherine & Robert V. Kail (2002): Cross-cultural similarities in the predictors of reading acquisition. Child Development 73.5: 1392-1407. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8624.00479
Meletis, Dimitrios (2019): Naturalness in scripts and writing systems: Outlining a Natural Grapholinguistics. PhD dissertation, University of Graz.
Primus, Beatrice (2003): Zum Silbenbegriff in der Schrift-, Laut- und Gebärdensprache – Versuch einer mediumübergreifenden Fundierung. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 23.1: 3-55. DOI: 10.1515/zfsw.2003.22.1.3
Röber-Siekmeyer, Christa (2004): Die Berücksichtigung des kindlichen Sprachwissens für den Schrifterwerb. In Hans-Werner Huneke (ed.), Geschriebene Sprache. Strukturen, Erwerb, didaktische Modellbildungen, 129-144. Heidelberg: Mattes.
Will, Udo, Guido Nottbusch & Rüdiger Weingarten (2006): Linguistic units in word typing. Effects of word presentation modes and typing delay. Written Language and Literacy 9.1: 153-176. DOI: 10.1075/wll.9.1.10wil
In order to move beyond dominant (synchronic) spelling principles, writing system typologies need to adopt a more diverse set of criteria (Share & Daniels 2016), which can be organized beneficially under three categories: (a) linguistic fit (match between writing system and language), (b) processing fit (both physiological and cognitive) and (c) sociocultural fit (communicative and social functions) (Meletis 2018). Naturally, such diverse categories interact dynamically and are often in conflict, but, crucially, they can afford valuable insights into the diachronic ‘evolution’ of writing systems.
Our paper elucidates these criteria with observations from both the German and Japanese writing systems. Japanese is a complicated mixture, consisting of morphographic kanji, syllabographic kana, and alphabetic Roman script, and although generally classified as an alphabet, German is also more accurately analyzed as a mixed system, due to its pervasive morphography (Schmidt 2018; Berg 2019). Moreover, their respective grapheme inventories are highly contrastive, and a number of inventory-related criteria have direct implications at various levels of graphematic representation. These, in turn, are of particular significance for many processing factors, such as syllabification and the saliency of syllables (cf. the emergence of the graphematic syllable in German; Fuhrhop & Schmidt 2014).
Of profound relevance to writing systems typology, the diverse criteria explored in this paper are particularly promising for cross-linguistic investigations of writing systems and for illuminating their diachronic changes.
References:
Berg, K. (2019). Die Graphematik der Morpheme im Deutschen und Englischen. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Daniels, P. T. (2018). An exploration of writing. Bristol: Equinox.
Fuhrhop, N. & K. Schmidt (2014). Die zunehmende Profilierung der Schreibsilbe in der Geschichte des Deutschen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 136(4), 538-568.
Gelb, I. J. (1952): A study of writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Joyce, T. (2016). Writing systems and scripts. In A. Rocci & L. de Saussure (eds.), Verbal communication (287–308). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Meletis, D. (2018). What is natural in writing? Prolegomena to a Natural Grapholinguistics. Written Language and Literacy 21(1), 52-88.
Sampson, G. (2015). Writing systems: a linguistic introduction (2nd ed.). Bristol: Equinox.
Share, D. L. & P. T. Daniels (2016). Aksharas, alphasyllabaries, abugidas, alphabets and orthographic depth: Reflections on Rimzhim, Katz and Fowler (2014). Writing Systems Research 8(1), 17-31.
Schmidt, K. (2018). Phonographie und Morphographie im Deutschen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Mit diesem natürlichkeitstheoretischen Fundament kann erklärt werden, warum Schriftsysteme so aussehen, wie sie heute aussehen. Erklärungen werden dabei weiter unterteilt in drei Bereiche: linguistische, verarbeitungstechnische und soziokulturelle. Linguistisch kann untersucht werden, wie Schriftsysteme als sekundäre, visuelle semiotische Systeme sich dem jeweiligen zugrunde liegenden Sprachsystem (als primärem semiotischen System) anpassen. Verarbeitungstechnisch gilt, was Dehaene (2009) konstatiert: Schrift ist als Erfindung zu jung, als dass Menschen sich evolutionär an sie hätten anpassen können, also war es umgekehrt – Schrift passte sich unserer Biologie und Kognition an. Drittens bleibt für Schrift als Kulturtechnik die hochrelevante soziokulturelle Dimension. Schriftsysteme sind geprägt durch die Bedürfnisse von literaten Sprachgemeinschaften. Sie erlauben es, sich als Individuum oder Gruppe sozial zu präsentieren, zu positionieren etc. Diese drei Dimensionen spiegeln sich in der diachronen Ent-wicklung von Schrift sowie ihrer synchronen Struktur wider.
In diesem Vortrag werden die Grundpfeiler einer natürlichen Schriftlinguistik sowie die drei genannten Erklärungsdimensionen anhand von Beispielen aus den diversesten Schriftsystemen – Deutsch, Chinesisch, Thailändisch, Arabisch, Koreanisch – vorgestellt und illustriert.
Dehaene, Stanislas (2009): Reading in the brain: the new science of how we read. London: Penguin.
Donegan, Patricia & David Stampe (2009): Hypotheses of Natural Phonology. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45.1: 1-31. DOI: 10.2478/v10010-009-0002-x
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Marianne Kilani-Schoch (2016): Natural Morphology. In Andrew Hippisley & Gregory Stump (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology, 356-389. Cambridge: CUP.
Based on Meletis (2018), this talk introduces the core tenets of Natural Graphematics as an explanatory theoretical framework that makes possible the comparison of writing systems. It is positioned in the framework of Naturalness Theory and modeled after its subbranch of Natural Morphology. In Natural Morphology (Dressler et al., 1987), the semiotic structure of signs is assumed to have a bearing on how they are cognitively processed by humans, with structures that are cognitively processed with less effort being termed natural, giving the approach its name. As writing systems are semiotic systems linking the visual units of scripts (= signifiers) with linguistic units (= signifieds), the semiotic parameters of Natural Morphology can be fruitfully transferred to graphematics. Accordingly, parameters such as transparency (a grapheme is transparent if it only corresponds with one linguistic unit, e.g. German <f> only corresponds to /f/) prove to be useful categories for the description and comparison of the graphematic module of writing systems. In this talk, the parameters of iconicity, diagrammaticity, indexicality, transparency, compositional transparency, positional transparency, and figure—ground will be presented and illustrated with examples from a variety of diverse writing systems.
While the investigation of how these parameters are reflected in different writing systems descriptively evaluates their linguistic fit, i.e. how well they fit their respective languages, in a next step, the processing fit of these parameters can be assessed with the help of external evidence such as data from literacy acquisition and the history of writing. Here, the central question reads: How do the structural features of writing systems affect their processing by humans? The processing fit also gives Natural Graphematics its explanatory force, as it does not stop at describing structures, but strives to explain how human pressure has shaped them and how they affect humans. In sum, taken together, the naturalness parameters and their linguistic and processing fits introduced in this talk offer instruments for the evaluation of writing systems. This presents a remarkable step in the development of a theory of writing.
DRESSLER, WOLFGANG U., WILLI MAYERTHALER, OSWALD PANAGL, and WOLFGANG U. WURZEL. 1987. Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
MELETIS, DIMITRIOS. 2018. What is natural in writing? Prolegomena to a Natural Grapholinguistics. Written Language and Literacy 21:52-88.
ROGERS, HENRY. 1995. Optimal orthographies. In Scripts and literacy: reading and learning to read alphabets, syllabaries and characters, edited by INSUP TAYLOR, and DAVID R. OLSON, 31-43. Dordrecht: Springer.
WATT, W. C. 1998. The old-fashioned way. Semiotica 122:99-138.
A context in which it becomes strikingly apparent that orthography is a form of social action (cf. Jaffe 2012; Sebba 2007) is social media. Frequently, written utterances on Facebook etc. that include orthographic mistakes are corrected by others (who are sometimes referred to as gram-mar or spelling nazis). In numerous cases, this is done not neutrally but in a manner that osten-tatiously degrades the person who made the mistake. I call this phenomenon orthographic shaming. It is characterized by the fact that people interpret linguistic knowledge, in this case the knowledge of orthographic norms, as a source of power: knowing something others do not – and pointing this out to them – validates their superiority.
In this talk, I present the results of a study that employs a combination of three methods to in-vestigate orthographic shaming in German: (1) a qualitative analysis of 100 correction samples including the respective contexts on Facebook, (2) semi-structured oral interviews with 21 par-ticipants regarding their attitudes towards orthography, mistakes, and orthographic shaming, and (3) written interviews with ‘orthographic shamers.’
In the analysis, I focus on the pragmatic aspects of orthographic shaming. Informed by previous studies on speech acts in social media (cf. Carr, Schrock & Dauterman 2012), speech acts with-in orthographic shaming comments and the reactions to them are identified. Conclusions are drawn as to the pragmatic behavior surrounding orthographic shaming as well as the attitudes towards this behavior. Ultimately, the phenomenon of orthographic shaming is an expression of a negotiation of power and normativity and a gradual change of discussion culture.
References
Carr, Caleb T., David B. Schrock & Patricia Dauterman (2012): Speech acts within Facebook status messages. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31(2): 176-196.
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (et al.) (eds.) (2012): Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, iden-tity and power. Berlin: DeGruyter.
Johnson, Sally (2005): Spelling trouble? Language, ideology, and the reform of German or-thography. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Sebba, Mark (2007): Spelling and society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge: CUP.
A problem inherent in the modeling of writing is the question of the relationship between language, speech, and writing. In this context, predominantly Eurocentric efforts to define a graphematics autonomous from phonology have been misguided. This becomes evident when the approach is extended to non-phonographic writing systems, which yields the following question: if writing in morphographic systems such as Chinese is clearly dependent on mor-phology, why should writing in phonographic systems not be dependent on phonology, which is vehemently rejected by autonomists?
In this talk, I argue that writing and speech are two modalities of an abstract, amodal lan-guage system. What characterizes them and renders them so distinct is their materiality – visual on the one hand, acoustic on the other. They are not dependent on each other, but they are equal-ly dependent on abstract linguistic levels such as phonology and morphology. Crucially, pho-nology does not equal speech, but is interpreted amodally, offering minimal lexical contrasts that can be either spoken or written. Thus, while writing is always independent of speech, it can be dependent on phonology. Systems such as Chinese, however, can bypass this (direct) connec-tion to phonology and relate to morphological units instead. Consequently, minimal lexical con-trasts cannot be expressed in these systems. Ultimately, what has been termed grapheme in the autonomous approach and defined in analogy to the phoneme is exposed as an alphabetocentric concept not viable for a universal model of writing.
Using a variety of examples from diverse writing systems, I propose such a model that ac-counts for typological diversity and offers both graphetic and graphematic concepts and termi-nology for the description and comparison of historical and contemporary writing systems.
A context in which it becomes strikingly apparent that orthography is a form of social action (cf. Jaffe 2012; Sebba 2007) is social media. Frequently, written utterances on Facebook etc. that include orthographic mistakes are corrected by others. In numerous cases, this is done not neutrally but in a manner that ostentatiously degrades the person who made the mistake. I call this phenomenon orthographic shaming. It is characterized by the fact that people interpret linguistic knowledge, in this case the knowledge of orthographic norms, as a source of power: knowing something others do not – and pointing it out to them – validates their superiority.
In this talk, I discuss the results of a study that employs a combination of three methods to investigate orthographic shaming in German: (1) an analysis of 100 correction samples including the respective contexts on Facebook, (2) interviews with people of different backgrounds regarding their attitudes towards orthography, mistakes, and orthographic shaming, and (3) an internet survey based on Likert scales and open questions investigating the severity of different types of mistakes as well as possible reactions to them.
Questions that are addressed include: What criteria must be met for a correction to count as orthographic shaming? What are the contexts in which this phenomenon occurs? Which mistakes are most often corrected – is there a scale of severity? What are the motivations for people to engage in orthographic shaming? What are the reactions to orthographic shaming? And finally, what are general attitudes towards (German) orthography?
References:
Jaffe, Alexandra M. (et al.) (eds.) (2012): Orthography as social action: Scripts, spelling, identity and power. Berlin: DeGruyter.
Johnson, Sally (2005): Spelling trouble? Language, ideology, and the reform of German orthography. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Sebba, Mark (2007): Spelling and society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge: CUP.
Der euro- und alphabetozentrische Fokus der Schriftlinguistik und -forschung (vgl. Ehlich 2007; Share 2014) hat dazu geführt, dass der Diversität von Orthographie(n) bisher wenig bis gar keine Beachtung geschenkt wurde. Coulmas (1996: 379f.) nennt beispielweise Phonem-Graphem-Korrespondenzen, Wort- und Silbentrennung, Groß- und Kleinschreibung sowie die Schreibung von Lehnwörtern als zentrale Aspekte der orthographischen Normierung alphabetischer Schriftsysteme. Im Zuge eines Vergleichs von Schriftsystemen, wie ihn die komparative Schriftlinguistik (Meletis i.E.; Weingarten 2011) vornimmt, wird jedoch deutlich, dass nur wenige dieser Aspekte orthographieübergreifend von Bedeutung sind; vielmehr unterliegen andere, spezifische Bereiche der jeweiligen Schriftsysteme orthographischen Normen.
Dieser Vortrag behandelt anhand von zahlreichen Beispielen die Frage, wie orthographische „Regeln“ und „Rechtschreibfehler“ in Systemen wie dem Chinesischen, dem Arabischen, dem Thailändischen, dem Japanischen, dem Koreanischen und dem Hebräischen aussehen; auf diese Weise wird die Diversität von Orthographie(n) bzw. orthographischen Modulen beleuchtet. Gleichzeitig wird untersucht, inwiefern „orthographische Universalien“ bzw. universale Tendenzen existieren. Ebenfalls werden die Akteur_innen und Interessensvertreter_innen thematisiert, die an der Gestaltung einer Orthographie teilhaben: Wer sind sie und was sind ihre Motivationen? Der Vortrag schließt mit einem Fazit, in dem Vorschläge für die zukünftige Orthographieforschung gemacht werden und für eine differenziertere Schriftlinguistik plädiert wird.
I will argue that the misleading reductionist analogy between phonology/phonetics and graphematics/graphetics as well as the lack of commitment to one of the views listed above have contributed to a false hierarchizing within grapholinguistics. This has e. g. led to the ambiguity of terms such as allography, referring both to material (|a| and |ɑ|) as well as functional variation (<ph> and <f> for /f/). Therefore, a consistent distinction between graphetic and graphematic units seems inevitable: by postulating a central graphetic unit termed basic shape (cf. Rezec 2013), the grapheme is relieved of its duty of being both functional and material.
Furthermore, I will address the challenge of finding a conception of grapheme that holds across various types of writing systems (cf. Lockwood 2001). Can e. g. Chinese and German graphemes be compared? How does comparison inform our understanding of the grapheme? And can the grapheme further our understanding of what is at the core of all writing systems?
I will close my talk with refined terminological suggestions for grapholinguistics and a possible answer to the question if there is indeed a need for the concept of grapheme.
References
Bazell, C. E. (1956): The grapheme. Litera 3, 43–46.
Daniels, Peter T. (1991): Is a structural graphemics possible? LACUS Forum XVIII, 528–537.
Herrick, Earl M. (1994): Of course a structural graphemics is possible! LACUS Forum XXI, 413–424.
Kohrt, Manfred (1986): The term ‘grapheme’ in the history and theory of linguistics. In Gerhard Augst (ed.), New trends in graphemics and orthography, 80–96. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Lockwood, David G. (2001): Phoneme and grapheme – How parallel can they be? LACUS Forum XXVII, 307–316.
Neef, Martin (2015): Writing systems as modular objects: proposals for theory design in grapholinguistics. Open Linguistics 1, 708–721.
Rezec, Oliver (2013): Ein differenzierteres Strukturmodell des deutschen Schriftsystems. Linguistische Berichte 234, 227–254.