Languages & Linguistics
Orthographic Features
Orthographic features refer to the visual representation of language through writing systems. This includes aspects such as spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Understanding orthographic features is important for analyzing and comparing different writing systems, as well as for studying the impact of orthography on language processing and literacy development.
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10 Key excerpts on "Orthographic Features"
eBook - PDF- Jost Gippert, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Ulrike Mosel(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Consequently, a shallow orthography of such a 280 Frank Seifart language may preserve the graphic identity of morphemes to the same de-gree as a deep orthography of a language with many morphophonological changes. The term orthographic depth thus refers – broadly speaking – to the level of linguistic structure at which the features represented in the orthog-raphy are located. Another important question is which of the manifold features present in a spoken message should be represented in an orthogra-phy at all. Linguistic analysis is crucial here since it reveals the distinctive features of the language, e.g. phonological contrasts. From a strictly struc-tural point of view, a single minimal pair is enough for a given feature to count as distinctive. However, some features are clearly more important than others in the sense of “the extent to which users of the orthography rely on that feature in reading and writing the language” (Bird 1999b: 14). This is referred to as the functional load of a linguistic feature. For the de-velopment of an orthography it is important to evaluate the functional load of a linguistic feature in order to decide whether or not it should be repre-sented in the orthography. Functional load can be approximated by assessing how many words or utterances a given feature differentiates. For instance, in English some words are distinguished by stress, e.g. cónvert vs. convért , prótest vs. protést . These words are homographs in English, and in a list of isolated words there would indeed be ambiguity (and these words could count as minimal pairs in such a context). However, these words are not many, which is already indicative of the relatively low functional load of stress in English, at least with regard to distinguishing basic lexical items. In addi-tion, the members of these pairs belong to different parts of speech (nouns vs. verbs) and thus they are easily disambiguated in context.
eBook - ePubWriting Systems and Their Use
An Overview of Grapholinguistics
- Dimitrios Meletis, Christa Dürscheid(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Nerius (2007 , 2020). The features he focuses on are based on an investigation of German orthography; therefore, they may be generalised and applied to other orthographies only with caution. Nonetheless, as we will see, given their broad nature, the majority of them do also apply – to varying degrees – to orthographies of other, including non-alphabetical, writing systems. Orthographies are commonly:- externally codified, i.e., authorities of linguistic policy (such as councils, language academies, publishers of dictionaries) decide on and codify orthographic rules and correct spellings.
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socially binding, i.e., users commonly adhere to orthographic norms and simultaneously perceive them to be binding while ascribing to them the feature of being binding. This bindingness also leads to social sanctions of deviance from the norm.
- characterised by limited variability, i.e., in most cases there will be one unambiguously correct way of spelling something.
- static, or, in other words, only changeable in the course of orthography reforms.
The first described feature of orthographies is that they are (1) external and codified standardisations. While ‘codified’, as already mentioned above, means that orthographic norms are systematically laid down in written form as rules, ‘external’ refers to two aspects: firstly, orthographic rules are commonly prescribed by outside regulators rather than being internal norms (or better: conventions) that users mainly arrive at through their own implicit graphematic analysis of the writing system (see also the next section). Secondly, ‘external’ also refers to these very outside regulators: behind most orthographies, there stand authorities who have the power to either decide on the norms or codify them – or both. For the pluricentric German, for example, both of these tasks are carried out by the Council for German Orthography (German Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung) in which 41 members from seven countries and regions decide on orthographic regulations and, in the next step, codify them by means of a rulebook, the so-called Amtliche Regelung ‘official regulation’. While the Amtliche Regelung codifies general rules of the orthography as well as distinct spellings in an additional word list (the last version of which includes roughly 12,000 entries), dictionaries – such as the Duden or the Wahrig – which are not associated with the Council for German Orthography
eBook - ePub- Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy, Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy, Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
s present in a text, and thus amenable to investigation, as well as their distribution, seem to depend on the extra-linguistic factors involved, as the following sections will show. The typology and distribution of orthographic variables can also differ across languages.In fact, there has only recently been a growing recognition of the usefulness of orthographic variation for linguistic, especially sociolinguistic, investigations. But authors examining the distribution of orthographic variants according to extra-linguistic factors rarely use the term orthographic variable , and even those who do use it do not offer a clear-cut definition of it. For example, Stenroos (2004 and 2006) investigated the realizations of the variables (th) and (gh) in Middle English texts, and Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre (1999) examined the variables (sh), (wh), and (u) in Early Modern English documents, referring to the word-initial, word-final, and occasionally word-medial orthographic variants found in a number of lexemes. These correspond to orthographic realizations of particular phonemes, or, in terms of placement, the onsets, codas, and nuclei of the syllables which they represent. For instance, the variable (wh) may refer to the Middle English spellings <wh>, <qw>, <qu> in the word WHICH, presumably pronounced as the labio-velar semivowel /w/. Thus the term orthographic variable is not equivalent to grapheme , as different graphemes (including their allographs) or combinations of graphemes can be variants of the same variable. Neither is it necessarily directly related to the phoneme, though in the example given above it is compatible with that unit of the phonological system. Nevertheless, an orthographic variable may also comprise orthographic realizations of morphological categories, such as: the preterite and past participle ending {-ed} (Oldireva-Gustaffson 2002, Sairio 2009: 226–61); whole lexical items, for instance (much), (such), and (which) in former stages of English (Taavitsainen 2004, Conde-Silvestre and Hernández-Campoy 2004, Hernández-Campoy and Conde-Silvestre 2005). It may even operate at the level above the word boundary, for example contracted vs. non-contracted forms of auxiliary verbs such as don’t and do not
- Philip Baldi(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Interpretation of orthographic forms 631 Notes 1. This paper is a slightly revised version of the paper presented at the Workshop on Language Change and Reconstruction Methodology. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Stephen Lieberman for pointing out an error of logic and Johanna Nichols one of fact. Responsibility for any remaining shortcomings remains, of course, with me. 2. See Lass (1980: 46 ff.) for amplification. While I accept Lass' comments con-cerning the non-verifiability of historical statements, I do not share his view that historical studies are necessarily non-explanatory and, hence, non-scientific. The distinction made by Cummins (1983: 1 ff.) between subsumption explana-tions (the only ones Lass deals with) and analysis explanations can, I suspect, profitably be applied to linguistic and historical explanation, as well as to cognitive psychological explanation. 3. Like Sampson (1985: 20), I use the term orthography to refer to the conven-tional written representation of a particular language state. Thus, for example, American and British English have different orthographies. 4. On the bidialectal (diglossie?) relationship between written and spoken language, see Sampson (1985: 27). As Sampson notes, written English is essentially a formal, even literary, congener of ordinary spoken English. As such, it has its own conventions and, importantly, its own phonology. 5. For a similar definition, see Daniels (1986). 6. Studdert-Kennedy (1987: 69 — 70) similarly distinguishes between the specifi-cational nature of a phonetic representation and the indicational nature of a written representation. An orthographic form suggests a spoken form but, unlike a speaker's internalized phonological representation, does not directly embody directions for pronunciation.
eBook - ePubVisual Word Recognition Volume 2
Meaning and Context, Individuals and Development
- James Adelman(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
The goal of this chapter was to analyze and review what is currently understood about orthographic learning. We sought to discuss the evidence underlying how children move from a slow, laborious word identification process to effortless and instantaneous word recognition ability. Ironically, to date, our best understanding of this process suggests that, in many ways, it is the participation in the initial stages of word identification that enables a child to become a skilled reader. It is the effortful decoding that characterizes early reading, which brings about the reader’s attunement to the regularities of written language and provides the opportunity to secure detailed word-specific orthographic information in memory and ultimately to read words by sight. This ‘self-teaching’ mechanism is powerful and appears to become activated quickly and persist long term regardless of whether words are read silently or aloud, and with the support of context or in its absence. In fact, it is the multitude of different types of reading experiences that allows the reader to continue to develop and refine the print lexicon throughout adulthood.We have also attempted to contextualize the discussion of orthographic learning by highlighting the underlying role that language-specific factors play in determining orthographic learning. Although orthography is a universal constituent of word recognition, readers of deep orthographies may be more dependent on orthographic information and the ability to develop well-specified orthographic representations than readers of shallow orthographies. Nevertheless, the study of the differences in orthographic learning between languages is in its infancy and in this review we have discussed only some of the differences in orthographic learning across the alphabetic
eBook - PDFReading in a Second Language
Moving from Theory to Practice
- William Grabe, Junko Yamashita(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
150 Part II: Patterns of Variation in Reading Many books describe linguistic differences across L1s as well as examining their impact on reading skills development. This chapter focuses primarily on word recognition processes and the impact of differing L1 orthographies, phonologies, and morphologies on word recognition processes. While languages vary considerably in their syn- tactic structures, relatively little research demonstrates how these dif- ferences would impact readers from different L1s (and L2s) (cf. Frost, 2012; Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2017a). Differences across L1s in higher- order reading processes, to the extent that they can be generalized, are less likely to be due to language differences in the orthography, phonology, morphology, and syntax of the languages involved. 7.2 Orthographic Systems Orthography refers to the writing system and how the writing forms (or graphemes) of a language reflect the phonology (as discrete sounds and syllable units) and morphology (as minimal units of meaning) of a language. These are the two prominent language subsystems critical for word recognition in a language. Anyone who has learned both a non-alphabetic language and an alphabetic language (one as L1, the other as L2) is well aware of the large differences that the orthogra- phy of the language can impose on visual comprehension processing. These differences include the extent to which phonology is directly reflected in the orthographic graphemes and the extent to which morphology is directly coded in the orthography. They also include whether or not the language is primarily alphabetic, syllabic (e.g., Cherokee or Japanese Kana), alphasyllabic or abugida (e.g., Kannada or Thai), morphosyllabic (e.g., Chinese or Japanese Kanji), or conso- nantal alphabetic or abjad (e.g., Arabic or Hebrew) (Chang & Per- fetti, 2018; Share, 2017). In alphabetic languages, each graph (or digraph) maps onto a pho- neme.
eBook - PDF- William Bright(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
If a means of visual representation is available, the utterance may be manifested by units of this kind. If these visual symbols are alphabetic, as in the case of English, there is some relationship between the phonology and the orthography. An orthography therefore constitutes an alter-native means for manifesting utterances. When one has been in use for a long time, as in the case of English, special stylistic customs for writing tend to develop. That is, one's selection from the lexical and syntactic resources is likely to be affected by the means which he is using for mani-festation, for these means are usually employed for different purposes and under different circumstances. In this discussion, we are not considering such stylistic differences, assuming only that, if something is to be read, it must first be written. In developing a theory of reading, one may simply regard the phonology and ortho-graphy as alternative sets of symbols, or he may regard one of them as primary and the other as derivative. In the latter case, he may regard the phonology as primary and investigate the orthographic representation of speech sounds. This is the approach which comes naturally from Bloomfieldian linguistics. On the other hand, he may regard the orthography as primary and work out the pronunciations of letters and sets of letters. This has been the traditional approach in the teaching of reading, at least in those methods which include some attention to 'sounding out the words'. Some methods apparently accept the notion that the phonology and the orthography are simply alternative means of representation and make no systematic efforts to correlate them.
- Mari C. Jones, Damien Mooney(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The crea- tion of a written norm is often viewed as an integral part of modern language (Sgall 1987:22) and an indispensable tool in the reversal of language shift. While an orthographical system may be defined simply as ‘a system for representing a language in written form’ (Rice and Cahill 2014b:2), the process of developing an orthography is influenced by, and dependent upon, a wide variety of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors: ‘beyond purely linguistic considerations, there are a range of social, psychological, economic, political, and historical issues involved in making decisions about how to write a language’ (Grenoble and Whaley 2006:137). It is important to take account of all relevant factors to ensure that the resultant orthography is ‘(i) mechanically suited for the language it is to reflect, (ii) compatible with, or at a minimum, not alien to its social-cultural setting, and (iii) psychologically and pedagogically appropriate for its speak- ers’ (Venezky 1970:256). This section provides general information on the different types of script and on different orthographic systems available to the orthography developer, before discussing in detail the various linguistic (Section 5) and extra-linguistic (Section 6) factors involved in orthography development. The following conventions are used: /a/ – phonemic represen- tation; [a] – phonetic representation; – orthographic representation (following Seifart 2006:276 and Rice and Cahill 2014:6). It is first necessary to distinguish between a script, a graphic system, and an orthography. The visual shape of the letters, or graphemes, used by a writing system is known as its script (Seifart 2006:277) – e.g., Arabic script, Latin script, Cyrillic script, Devangari script. A graphic system is the abstract underlying type of writing system used and may be alphabetic, syllabic, logo- graphic, etc.
- Joshua A. Fishman(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
38 This fundamental function of orthog- 24 Valter Tauli raphy is not disproved by the fact that many features of speech are ig-nored in writing and in the latter there occur purely 'visual morphemes', signs that have no correspondence in the vocal-auditory process. Even Bolinger, who has insisted that 'writing can exist as a series of mor-phemes at its own level, independent of or interacting with the more fundamental (or at least more primitive) vocal-auditory morphemes', and who is regarded as the representative of the doctrine of independence, admits that 'most writing is the graphic representation of vocal-auditory processes'. 39 Further, the fundamental function of orthography is not dis-proved by the fact that in many countries the vocabulary and grammar of the written language differ in several points from those of the spoken lan-guage (cf. diglossia). This fact is a matter of spelling; as such a written language is also read aloud and often spoken. 40 If we accept Hill's definition of the purpose of spelling - that the func-tion of orthography is to represent speech - then the question is: which units of speech are to be symbolized by graphemes? It should be obvious that the most economic system is the symbolizing of phonemes on the ground of the simple fact that it employs the fewest symbols and rules to represent speech. 41 Such a system is certainly easier in learning to read and write. 42 Thus the most efficient orthography is phonemic. It is essential to stress this simple BASIC , phonemic principle of orthography, in spite of practical difficulties in applying it in many languages. 43 By definition a phonemic orthography cannot represent more than one dialect at the same time if the differences are on the phonemic level. Thus a standard orthography must inevitably be based on one speech form, be it the standardized speech or a culturally or politically dominant dialect.
eBook - PDF- Pieter Reitsma, Ludo Verhoeven, Pieter Reitsma, Ludo Verhoeven(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
It is possible to hypothesize that the term orthographic structure could also simply and perhaps more parsimoniously be regarded as synonymous with wordlike structure. The ability to discriminate between letter strings which are wordlike or not obviously depends heavily upon knowledge that certain patterns of letters are words. This line of reasoning suggests that knowledge of orthography is a direct function of reading achievement, or more precisely the number of words and the frequency in which words have been processed so that familiarity with the written form of these words is acquired. Some recognition vocabulary most probably precedes the generalization of orthographic structural knowledge and may also be fundamental to further acquisition of reading skill. That is, beyond initial acquisition of a reading vocabulary and some knowledge of orthographic structure and relationships with phonology, these two aspects exist both as a consequence of what has been learned and as a cause of further progress in word reading skill. Finally, it has been noted before that in contrast to a 'deep' alphabetic orthography such as English, Dutch can be considered to have a relatively 'shallow' orthography with more consistent spelling-sound correspondences. One can assume that the conversion of orthography to phonological representations is more rapid and more accurate in a relatively shallow orthography and therefore encourages the use of phonology in accessing the mental lexicon. The review of research findings in this chapter instead indicates that the direct use of orthographic properties is also necessary and in fact fairly salient in processing the Dutch orthography. Thus, 64 Reitsma differences among orthographies may lead to differences in the weights of orthographic and phonological encodings, but both will be used in processing either a deep or a shallow orthography.
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