Systematic orthography of German

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Neef
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2011 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 192731679

Despite the obvious relevance of orthography for the social life of a literate culture, there have been relatively few attempts from the side of linguistics to develop formal theories of orthographies. Such theories could serve as the base for developing concepts of the didactics of reading and writing or for reforming orthography. Theories that have been proposed for alphabetic writing systems assume in modeling sound-related aspects that a direct mapping from sound structure to orthographic form is viable. The Modular Theory of Writing systems, that has been formulated by the applicant, proceeds differently in that it assumes that a writing system has at least two different modules, which are called Graphematics and Systematic Orthography, respectively. While the graphematics of German is analyzed in full detail in Neef (2005a), prior to the start of the project only few works dealing with the Systematic Orthography of German existed.The focus of the first phase of the project has been analyzing the relations of Systematic Orthography to the sound system of the language. Starting point of modeling was the conviction that for words, specific possible spellings are ruled out, depending on the word's membership to a specific part of the vocabulary. A word with the sound form [baf], for example, may be spelled if belonging to the native vocabulary, it may additionally be spelled if being a foreign word, additionally if being a proper name, and additionally if being an interjection. In this way, four distinct levels of the vocabulary are addressed. A system of constraints captures specifications of how words of these different levels of the vocabulary may be spelled. The basis of this method is a well-defined set of possible spellings of a word, which all have the property that they can be read (viz. recoded) as the intended sound form.In the next phase of the project, the relations of Systematic Orthography to the morphological component of the language shall be analyzed. The core of investigation will be the question how the constancy of the spelling of roots can be captured. In the pertinent literature, it is usually said that roots have to be spelled as constant as possible, but the borders of constancy are never determined in an exact way. The framework of Systematic Orthography allows such an exact approach by looking at the intersection of possible spellings of all words belonging to the paradigm of a lexeme. If this intersection is empty, there is no constant spelling of the root available. In this case, as in the opposite case when the intersection contains more than one element, the task is to find general principles of how the actual spelling of the root is fixed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants