Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century - 2020

Yannis Haralambous

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GRAPHOLINGUISTICS AND ITS APPLICATIONS

# Grapholinguistics
in the 21st Century—2020

/grafematik/

Proceedings

June 17-19, 2020

Yannis Haralambous (Ed.)

Part I

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Fluxus Editions
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>
Series Editor

Yannis Haralambous, IMT Atlantique & CNRS Lab-STICC, France

Series Editorial Committee

Gabriel Altmann†, formerly Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany

Jacques André, formerly IRISA, Rennes, France

Vlad Atanasiu, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland

Nicolas Ballier, Université de Paris, France

Kristian Berg, Universität Oldenburg, Germany

Chuck Bigelow, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

Stephen Chrisomalis, Wayne State University, USA

Florian Coulmas, Universität Duisburg, Germany

Joseph Dichy, Université Lumière Lyon 2 & CNRS, Lyon, France

Christa Dürscheid, Universität Zürich, Switzerland

Martin Dürst, Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan

Keisuke Honda, Imperial College and University of Oxford, UK

Shu-Kai Hsieh, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Terry Joyce, Tama University, Japan

George A. Kiraz, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA

Mark Wilhelm Küster, Office des publications of the European Union, Luxembourg

Gerry Leonidas, University of Reading, UK

Dimitrios Meletis, Universität Zürich, Switzerland

Kamal Mansour, Monotype, USA

Klimis Mastoridis, University of Nicosia, Cyprus

Tom Mullaney, Stanford University, USA

Martin Neef, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany

J.R. Osborn, Georgetown University, USA

Cornelia Schindelin, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany

Virach Sornlertlamvanich, SICCT, Thammasat University, Thailand

Emmanuël Souchier, Université de la Sorbonne, Paris

Jürgen Spitzmüller, Universität Wien, Austria

Richard Sproat, Google, USA

Susanne Wehde, MRC Managing Research GmbH, Germany
Yannis Haralambous (Ed.)

# Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century

/gβafematik/

June 15-17, 2020 (online)

Proceedings

Part I

Fluxus Editions
Yannis Haralambous (Ed.). 2021. *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century. June 15-17, 2020. Proceedings* (Grapholinguistics and Its Applications, Vol. 4).
Brest: Fluxus Editions.

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Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
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ISBN: 978-2-9570549-6-1

e-ISBN: 978-2-9570549-8-5

ISSN: 2681-8566

e-ISSN: 2534-5192

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-graf1

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# Table of Contents

Preface .................................................... ix

List of Participants at the Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century
2020 Conference ........................................ xi

## PART I

MARTIN NEEF. – The Written Utterance as a Core Concept in
Grapholinguistics .................................... 1

MARTIN EVERTZ-RITTICH. – What Is a Written Word? And if So,
How Many? ............................................ 25

SVEN OSTERKAMP & GORDIAN SCHREIBER. – Challenging the Di-
chotomy Between Phonography and Morphography: Transi-
tions and Gray Areas ................................ 47

STEFANO PRESUTTI. – The Interdependence Between Speech and
Writing. Towards a Greater Awareness ................ 83

AMALIA E. GNANADESIKAN. – S₁: The Native Script Effect .... 103

DIMITRIOS MELETIS. – On Being a Grapholinguist .... 125

CORINNA SALOMON. – Comparative Perspectives on the Study of
Script Transfer, and the Origin of the Runic Script .... 143

DANIEL HARBOUR. – Grammar Drives Writing System Evolution.
Lessons From the Birth of Vowels .................... 201

SVEVA ELTI DI RODEANO. – Scripts in Contact: Transmission of
the First Alphabets ................................ 223

DALMA VÉRY. – Mutable Imagination: Typography and Textual
Space in Print and Digital Layouts ................ 241
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>STEFANO PRESUTTI. – Graphemic Complexity for the New Romance Phonemes in Italian. Some Reflections</td>
      <td>755</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>VICTORIA FENDEL. – A Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for a People—The Coptic Language</td>
      <td>775</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>HELEN GIUNASHVILI. – Old Aramaic Script in Georgia</td>
      <td>787</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>LIUDMILA L. FEDOROVA. – On the Typology of Writing Systems</td>
      <td>805</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>PIERS KELLY. – The Naasioi Otomaung Alphabet of Bougainville. A Preliminary Sketch From Afar</td>
      <td>825</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>ROBERT M. SCHOCH &amp; TOMI S. MELKA. – A “Sacred Amulet from Easter Island—1885/6—”. Analyzing Enigmatic Graphic Characters in the Context of the <i>rongorongo</i> Script</td>
      <td>847</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>HANA JEE, MONICA TAMARIZ &amp; RICHARD SHILCOCK. – Quantifying Sound-Graphic Systematicity. Application to Multiple Phonographic Orthographies</td>
      <td>905</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>LOH JIA SHENG COLIN &amp; FRANCESCO PERONO CACCIAFOCO. – A New Approach to the Decipherment of Linear A, Stage 2. Crypt-analysis and Language Deciphering: A “Brute Force Attack” on an Undeciphered Writing System</td>
      <td>927</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>ESTER SALGARELLA &amp; SIMON CASTELLAN. – SigLA: The Signs of Linear A. A Palæographical Database</td>
      <td>945</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>KEVIN DONNELLY. – Digitising Swahili in Arabic Script With <i>Andika!</i></td>
      <td>963</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>DUODUO XU. – A Semantic Index for a Dongba Script Database</td>
      <td>985</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Dominique Boutet, <i>In Memoriam</i></td>
      <td>1007</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>CLAIRE DANET, DOMINIQUE BOUTET†, PATRICK DOAN, CLAUDIA SAVINA BIANCHINI, ADRIEN CONTESSE, LÉA CHÈVREFILS, MORGANE RÉBULARD, CHLOÉ THOMAS &amp; JEAN-FRANÇOIS DAUPHIN. – Transcribing Sign Languages With TYPANNOT: The Typographic System That Retains and Displays Layers of Information</td>
      <td>1009</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>CLAUDIA S. BIANCHINI. – How to Improve Metalinguistic Awareness by Writing a Language Without Writing: Sign Languages and Signwriting</td>
      <td>1039</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>CHRISTIAN KOCH. – Language Identity Through Cyrillic Script. From Romanian to Moldovan by Automatic Transliteration in the Wikimoldia Project</td>
      <td>1067</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
Preface

The second edition of the *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century* conference was held online, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, on June 15–17, 2020. In these *Proceedings* are collected fourty-two contributions derived from oral or poster presentations.

The first five papers (Neef, Evertz-Rittich, Osterkamp & Schreiber, Pre-
sutti, and Gnanadesikan) contribute to the theoretical body of grapholin-
guistics, addressing core concepts: the written utterance, the written word,
phonography and morphography, the interdependence of speech and writ-
ing, and the native script effect. Offering a global perspective, the paper
by Meletis, author of the recently released *The nature of writing: A theory
of grapholinguistics*, discusses the activity of being a grapholinguist, its chal-
lenges and promises.

The common theme of the papers by Salomon, Harbour, and Elti di Ro-
deano is *beginnings*: script creation or transfer (inspired by the runic script);
the influence of grammar on writing system evolution and the birth of vow-
els; transmission of the first alphabets.

The next block of six papers deals with (typo)graphetics: Véry explores
textual space; Haralambous, Landragin & Handa study graphemic and gra-
phetic methods in speculative fiction; Wachendorff examines urban spaces
in the Ruhr area; Kulish gives a survey of nonstandard, “emotional,” punctu-
ation; Bergerausen & Huot-Marchand and Pierson present their font cre-
ation projects, respectively, “Missing scripts” and “PIM” (ancient monetary
inscriptions).

In the papers that follow, Neuman gives an account of spelling variation
in Modern Hebrew from a sociocultural point of view; Dürscheid provides us
with insight on the use of emojis in social media; Melka & Schoch investigate
the possibility of communication, be it visual or auditory, with unknown
intelligence/s.

The last paper of the first part of the *Proceedings* provides an artist's per-
spective: Kettaneh gives us an account on her very inspired work involving
written language in many forms.

The second part of the *Proceedings* starts with a block of four papers in the
area of sinographemics: Joyce & Masuda explore three-character and four-
character words in Japanese; Honda provides us with a modular-theoretic
approach to the Japanese writing system; Myers and Morioka deal with the
internal structure of sinographs.
A group of eight contributions of historical nature follows. Stojanov deals with the description of punctuation in Western grammar books; Drozhaschikh, Efimova & Meshcheryakova with form-meaning regularities in Old English; Presutti with graphemics of new Romance phonemes in Italian; Fendel with Coptic alphabets; Giunashvili with Old Aramaic script in Georgia; Fedorova with Aztec emblems; Kelly with the Bougainville Naasioi Oto-maung alphabet; Schoch & Melka with the Easter Island rongorongo script.

The next block of five papers deals with applications of the computer in grapholinguistics: Jee, Tamariz & Shillcock study sound-graphic systematicity in various fonts; Sheng, Colin & Perono Cacciafoco attempt to decipher Linear A by a brute force attack; Salgarella & Castellan present a palæographical database for Linear A; Donnelly describes a system for digitizing Swahili in Arabic script; Xu presents a semantic index for the Dongba script of the Naxi people of Southwest China.

Speech and writing are not the only modalities of languages. There is also gestuality, used in sign languages. Two papers deal with the written transcription of sign languages: Danet et al. present the TYPANNOT system; Bianchini discusses metalinguistic awareness. Among the authors of Danet et al. is also Dominique Boutet who succumbed to the COVID-19 disease a few weeks before the conference.

The three papers that follow deal with the confrontation of two scripts. Koch investigates that between Roman and Cyrillic for the Moldovan language; Awad, Mourad & Elamil study the use of punctuation in French-to-Arabic translation; Rashwan investigates the visual untranslatability of the Ancient Egyptian and Arabic writing systems.

The volume concludes with a supernatural touch, as Küster leads us in a tour of magical writing, from cuneiform acrostics to modern manga.

The volumetry of these *Proceedings* is important: its 42 papers were written by 62 authors, span 1,122 pages (an average of 26.8 pages per paper, with a maximum of 102 and a minimum of 12 pages) and contain 412 figures and 1,940 bibliographical references; the index stretches to 1,247 entries. For technical reasons, the printed version of the *Proceedings* has been split into two parts: Part I, from Neef to Kettaneh (pages 1 to 577) and Part II, from Joyce & Masuda to Küster (pages 579 to 1122). Both front matter (preface, table of contents, list of participants) and back matter (index) are provided in both parts, the former in Roman page numbering (i-xii) and the latter in Greek page numbering (α'-κγ'). Some papers use different illustrations and text styles for the printed black & white version and the online color version.

All presentations at the *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century 2020* conference were recorded and can be viewed on Youtube. The links can be found on the conference webpage (https://grafematik2020.sciencesconf.org/ or https://perma.cc/3TJ6-RCJ5).
List of Participants
at the

*Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century 2020*
*Conference*

Ahlberg, Aija Katriina

Almuzaini, Rawan

Anderson, Debbie

Ashourinia, Kaveh

Avni, Shani

Awad, Dana

Ayre, Christine

Baggio, Pietro

Beaujard, Laurence

Bergerhausen, Johannes

Bering, Bianca

Bianchini, Claudia S.

Birk, Elisabeth

Březina, David

Caren, Daniel

Castellan, Simon

Chalkley, Kendra

Chew, Patrick

Clifton, John

Contesse, Adrien

Cooley, Christopher

Crellin, Robert

Dalma, Véry

Danet, Claire

Danziger, Eve

Davison, Phil

Donnelly, Kevin

Drozhashchikh, Nataliia

Dunlavey, Nicholas

Dürscheid, Christa

Dürst, Martin

Efimova, Elena

Elti di Rodeano, Sveva

Elvira Astoreca, Natalia

Esfahbod, Behnam

Evertz-Rittich, Martin

Farrando, Pere

Fedorova, Liudmila

Fendel, Victoria Beatrix

Fisher, Filipa

Folaron, Debbie

Gardner, William

Gaultney, Victor

Gautier, Antoine

Giunashvili, Helen

Gnanadesikan, Amalia

Gomez-Jimenez, Eva

Handa, Kenichi

Handel, Zev

Haralambous, Yannis

Harbour, Daniel

Honda, Keisuke

Huot-Marchand, Thomas

Hutto, Megan

Iannucci, David

Ikeda, Elissa

Issele, Joanna

Iyengar, Arvind

Izadpanah, Borna

Jee, Hana

Joyce, Terry

Judson, Anna

Kang, Michelle

Karakılçık, Pınar

Kelly, Piers

Kettaneh, Christine

Kobayashi-Better, Daniel

Koch, Christian
Kučera, Jan
Kulish, Olga
Küster, Marc
Landragin, Frédéric
Mansour, Kamal
Martinod, Emmanuella
Meilleur, Maurice
Meletis, Dimitrios
Melka, Tomi S.
Mescheryakova, Evgenia
Morioka, Tomohiko
Myers, James
Mykolaiv, Ivan
Nicolaou, Andrew
Osborn, J.R.
Osterkamp, Sven
Papazian, Hrant
Penney, Laurence
Perono Cacciafoco, Francesco
Pierson, Morgane
Plesniarski, Allan
Poth, Christina
Presutti, Stefano
Rashdan, Amany
Rashwan, Hany
Rauff, James
Riggs, Tamye
Roux, Élie
Sadan, Meir

Salgarella, Ester
Salomon, Corinna
Schindelin, Cornelia
Schneider, Elena
Schoch, Robert M.
Schönecker, Anna-Lisa
Schreiber, Gordian
Selvelli, Giustina
Serra, Laura
Shingledecker, Anna
Steele, Pippa
Stojanov, Tomislav
Taha, Haitham
Tauber, James
Tenenbaum, Abi
Ugray, Gábor
Verheijen, Lieke
Vlachou, Irene
Vranas, Apostolos
Wachendorff, Irmi
Waldispühl, Michelle
Walther, Urs
Wang, Ruoan
Wiebe, Bruce
Williamson, Ryan
Wöhrmann, Frithjof
Xu, Duoduo
Yang, Ben
Ziegler, Monica
# The Written Utterance as a Core Concept in Grapholinguistics

Martin Neef

*Abstract.* In the analysis of written language, the distribution of the punctuation marks dot, exclamation mark, and question mark is usually explained with reference to the concept of sentence. For this reason, these characters are referred to in German linguistics as 'Satzschlusszeichen' ('sentence closing marks'). However, if the term *sentence* is understood as in syntax, e.g., as a phrase with a finite verb as its head, it turns out that (e.g., in English) in some cases the marks in question actually follow what can be considered a sentence (*Where are you now?*?), but in many other cases they do not. In particular, the marks may follow less than a sentence (*Here!* or more than a sentence (*I am here and you are there.*) or they may be interspersed in a sentence (*Stop! Being! Stupid!*). In order to arrive at a proper analysis of such data, it is necessary to distinguish between two different structural concepts, the sentence as a strictly syntactic notion on the one hand and another concept belonging to the field of grapholinguistics on the other hand. There are numerous suggestions how to conceive this other concept. In the approach to be presented, it is termed *written utterance* and is considered to be what a writer understands as a coherent thought. It is important that the concepts of sentence and written utterance are completely independent of each other, since they belong to different areas of linguistics. A grapholinguistic analysis has to explain the well-formedness conditions of written utterances. In the grapholinguistic model, which serves as the background for the following analysis, the language system is considered as part of the writing system, so that in the analysis of written forms all concepts established for the analysis of the language system can be used. This model provides a specific answer to the pertinent question of the relationship between written language and spoken language.

## 1. On the Term Grapholinguistics

Grapholinguistics is a branch of linguistics that has developed into an independent field of research over the last 50 years.¹ The term *grapholinguin*-

Martin Neef

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

0000-0001-6786-3562

TU Braunschweig, Institut für Germanistik, Bienroder Weg 80, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany

E-mail: Martin.Neef@tu-braunschweig.de

1. The reasons why grapholinguistics has long been neglected as a relevant part of linguistics are explained in Ludwig (1980, p. 324) and Günther and Günther (1983, pp. ix–x); cf. also Neef (2012, p. 215).

Y. Haralambous (Ed.), *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century 2020. Proceedings*

Grapholinguistics and Its Applications (ISSN: 2681-8566, e-ISSN: 2534-5192), Vol. 4.

Fluxus Editions, Brest, 2021, pp. 1–24. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-graf-neef

ISBN: 978-2-9570549-6-1, e-ISBN: 978-2-9570549-8-5
guistics, as I use it, originates from the tradition of the German-speaking research in this field. Dieter Nerius, the most important founder of grapholinguistics in Eastern Germany, outlines the general development of grapholinguistics in Germany as follows:

> die Orthographietheorie [...] hat [...] seit den 70er Jahren einen erheblichen Wissenszuwachs erfahren. Für das Deutsche begann die grundlegend neue Phase der linguistischen Erforschung der Orthographie Mitte der 70er Jahre in der Forschungsgruppe Orthographie des Zentralinstituts für Sprachwissenschaft an der ehemaligen Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR in Berlin und Rostock sowie in der Kommission für Rechtschreibfragen am Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Die hier entstehenden Arbeiten beschäftigten sich zunächst vorwiegend mit den theoretischen Grundlagen einer Reform der deutschen Orthographie, weiteten sich aber bald auf allgemeine Probleme der Orthographietheorie und Schriftlinguistik aus, die auch die internationale linguistische Diskussion von Fragen der Schriftlichkeit wesentlich beeinflußten. (Nerius, 1994, S. 1–2)<fnref n="2" />

When it became clear that the analysis of written language is more than the study of orthography, a unifying term was needed to replace the then prevailing term of ‘Orthographieforschung’ (‘orthography research’). An important two-volume handbook on this topic, edited by Hartmut Günther and Otto Ludwig, was published in 1994 and 1996 under the rather unclear title ‘Schrift und Schriftlichkeit’, translated into English in a hardly appropriate way as ‘Writing and its use’. While other publications in this series of handbooks bear such catchy names as *Morphology* or *Psycholinguistics*, scientific research into written language at that time still lacked a uniform and at the same time unifying term. It was not until 1988³ that Dieter Nerius first proposed the term ‘Schriftlinguistik’ for this purpose in a published text, namely in an introduction of an edited volume:

> Diese Publikation reißt sich ein in die Vielzahl von Arbeiten, die in jüngster Zeit zu Problemen der geschriebenen Sprache und der Orthographie in

<footnote n="2">2. "the theory of orthography [...] has [...] experienced a considerable increase in knowledge since the 1970s. For German, the fundamentally new phase of linguistic research into orthography began in the mid-1970s in the Orthography Research Group of the Central Institute of Linguistics at the former Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin and Rostock, and in the Commission for Orthographic Issues at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. The work that emerged here initially dealt primarily with the theoretical foundations of a reform of German orthography, but soon expanded to general problems of orthography theory and grapholinguistics, which also had a significant influence on the international linguistic discussion of questions of writing.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. According to Dieter Nerius (1994), his research group began to use this term around the year 1980. Independently of this tradition, Helmut Glück (p.c.) coined the same term in his 1984 habilitation thesis, published as Glück (1987, pp. 13, 59)) (cf. Neef, 2020).</footnote>
mehreren Ländern erschienen sind. Solche Arbeiten dokumentieren das aktuelle Interesse der internationalen Linguistik an diesem Forschungsgegenstand und zeigen, daß sich hier eine eigenständige linguistische Teildisziplin, die Schriftlinguistik oder Grapholinguistik entwickelt hat." (Nerius, 1988, S. 1)<fnref n="4" />

The term 'Schriftlinguistik' then became widespread in German linguistics. Milestones for this were a Festschrift for Dieter Nerius with this term in the title (Ewald and Sommerfeldt, 1995) and an introductory book to the respective field of research written by Christa Dürscheid entitled 'Einführung in die Schriftlinguistik', which was first published in 2002 and is currently available in its fifth edition of 2016.<fnref n="5" /> In 2004, Rüdiger Weingarten and I began editing a terminological dictionary on the topic in question as part of a series of dictionaries. The editors of the series suggested the title 'Schrift und Schriftlichkeit' for this book, while Weingarten and I chose 'Schriftlinguistik', with reference to Dürscheid (2002). The publication of the dictionary began in 2012 in digital form (Neef, 2012). In 2013, an English translation of the title became necessary. The publisher recommended the title 'graphemics', the series editors suggested 'writing', while Weingarten and I, after discussing the options 'grammatology', 'grammatography', and 'graphonomy', chose 'grapholinguistics' as the English equivalent to 'Schriftlinguistik', arguing that Nerius, in the above quote from 1988, had suggested as German terms both 'Schriftlinguistik' and 'Grapholinguistik', the latter term being easily translated into English as 'grapholinguistics'.<fnref n="6" />

I first used the term *grapholinguistics* in published form in Neef (2015). Dimitrios Meletis took up this suggestion in his talk *Naturalness of scripts and writing systems: Prolegomena to a Natural Grapholinguistics*, held at the 10th *International Workshop of Writing Systems* in May 2016 in Nijmegen (The Netherlands). A written version of this text was published in the proceedings of this conference under the title *What is natural in writing? Prolegomena to a natural grapholinguistics* (Meletis 2018), where he traces the history of this term (see also Dürscheid and Meletis 2019: 170). According to him, the

<footnote n="4">4. This publication is one of the many works on problems of written language and orthography that have appeared recently in several countries. Such studies document the current interest of international linguistics in this field of research and show that an independent linguistic sub-discipline, 'Schriftlinguistik' or 'Grapholinguistik', has developed.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. An English version of this book that Christa Dürscheid co-authors with Dimitrios Meletis is in preparation. To my knowledge, the title of this book is still under discussion.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. The term 'Grapho-Linguistics' was already used earlier in English linguistics to designate a completely different field of research, cf. Platt (1974; 1977).</footnote>
term *grapholinguistics* refers to ‘the linguistic sub[-]discipline dealing with the scientific study of all aspects of written language’ (Neef 2015: 711). It is the equivalent of German *Schriftlinguistik*, which was first proposed by Nerius & Augst (1988) and adopted by Dürscheid (2016) for the title of her seminal textbook. I follow Neef, Sahel & Weingarten (2012ff.) as well as Neef (2015) in using this term instead of one of numerous alternatives, such as *grammatology* [...], *graphonomy* [...], or *writing systems research* (the title of a prominent journal in the field). The term grapholinguistics not only can be aligned with designations used for other linguistic subdisciplines, such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, but also originated in the long German tradition of acknowledging and investigating writing in its own right. (Meletis, 2018, p. 61)

I am pleased that the term grapholinguistics has now even become part of the name of a book series, the one in which the present text is published.

## 2. Grapholinguistics for German: How to Deal With Official Rules

The background for the fact that linguists working on German have been unusually busy with orthography lies in the codification history of German orthography. Since 1901, there exists a state-regulated, uniform, explicitly codified orthography for the German language, that is binding for all German-speaking countries. Throughout the entire 20th century, there were efforts to reform this supranational orthographic regulation. For essential areas of spelling had not yet been explicitly addressed in 1901, including punctuation. The first reform took place in 1996 (effective since 1998), followed by a further reform in 2005 (cf., e.g., Johnson, 2005). In the run-up to these reforms, German linguistics finally recognized the relevance of research on written language.

Unlike many other languages, written German thus has a codified standard. However, this codification has its problems, and this is exactly what grapholinguists are concerned with. Typically, the standard is criticized in two different ways: On the one hand, certain codified spellings are considered unsystematic from a certain theoretical perspective and are therefore made the subject of a proposal for amendment. A suitable example is the change in spelling of words with the letter <ß> to <ss> when following a letter for a ‘short’ vowel, which was the most visible change of the 1996 reform. On the other hand, the official rules can be considered incomplete, vague, or contradictory. An example is word division at the end of lines, for which there are three different levels of codification in the official rules, a ‘rule of thumb’, a set of explicit rules, and an individual provision in the dictionary entries of each single word. These three levels are incompatible with each other.
In Neef (2008), I analyzed this issue in the context of a specific theory and made suggestions on how to reconcile the set of explicit rules with the individual cases, without giving an impetus to change the latter.

Punctuation can be studied in the same way. In the following, I will concentrate on the question how the distribution of the so-called ‘sentence closing marks’ can be explained. I will look at attempts to solve this problem for the English and the German writing systems. After outlining a specific grapholinguistic theory, I will then analyze the current topic within this theory by introducing the unit of written utterance.

### 3. What Is It That Ends With a Full Stop?

The set of sentence closing marks is generally considered to consist of at least the full stop, the exclamation mark, and the question mark. The full stop can be regarded as prototypical for these elements. An answer to the linguistic task of analyzing the distribution of this mark could be that the full stop is used to close a specific unit. Once this unit is defined, the question is solved. So, the research question is: What is it that ends with a full stop? The answer to this question could be language-specific or it could apply to many different writing systems, especially those that have the three elements in question.

Starting with the English writing system, a definition of the respective unit might be found in monographs on this writing system. Cook (2004) is a relevant example. He gives the obvious answer by stating that it is the sentence that ends with a full stop. Interestingly, he uses two different concepts of ‘sentence’, one for ‘spoken language’ and one for ‘written language’. According to Cook (ibid., p. 42), a sentence as a unit of spoken language is “grammatically complete and can stand by itself,” while a sentence as a unit of written language “is anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop”. The following examples in (1) are sentences that Cook uses to illustrate his concept, while the examples in (2) are cases that are obviously not sentences in the sense of the given definition:

(1) *Sentences according to Cook (ibid., p. 42)*

a. Come in.

b. Green.

c. In the morning.

(2) *Non-sentences according to the definition of Cook (ibid., p. 42)*

a. You are mad!

b. Who are you?

c. Come in
The sentences in (1) are special in that they constitute ‘verbless sentences’ or ‘non-clausal units’. Nevertheless, they count as sentences for Cook. The first two examples in (2) may actually be unproblematic for Cook. The definition given should be extended to exclamation marks and question marks, thus to the set of sentence closing marks in general. At least this is how I would like to interpret Cook’s explanations. More problematic is example (2c) which cannot count as a sentence for Cook, because it does not end with a sentence closing mark.

The central problem with Cook's definition is that it answers the current question circularly: What is it that ends with a full stop? It is the sentence, and a sentence is defined as a unit that ends with a full stop. In other words, this approach does not allow to give rules when to use a sentence closing mark. At the same time, this approach does not provide a basis for the concept of an error in the use of sentence closing marks. If such a mark is used (and the initial letter of the unit is a capital one), we have a sentence. Thus, the written form <I. Want. To. Go. Home.> would count as a sequence of five sentences. In general, the relation between the two concepts of sentence remains unclear. It only seems to be that *sentence* is the designation of two terms in English, which are in a relationship of homonymy.

A more refined approach is presented in Nunberg (1990) who distinguishes between the concepts ‘lexical sentence’ and ‘text sentence’. According to him, lexical sentences are traditionally defined in

> any of three ways: either syntactically (as a group of words 'that contains a subject and a predicate'); or prosodically (as a group of words 'that can be uttered by itself' or 'that can be followed by a pause'); or semantically (as a group of words 'that expresses a proposition' or 'that conveys a statement, question, command, or explanation' or 'that expresses a complete thought'). [...] But none of them deals with what we will call a 'text-sentence'. (ibid., pp. 21-22)

From this quote, it is clear that the definitions given for the lexical sentence do not apply to the text sentence. What a text sentence actually is, however, remains rather vague. Nunberg does not give a real definition, but only a structural characterization: "A text sentence consists of a single text-clause, or of two or more text-clauses" (ibid., pp. 25-26). The concept of text-sentence, thus, depends on the concept of text-clause. For the latter term, however, Nunberg (ibid., p. 26) states: "It is at the level of text-clause structure that complications begin to set in". I do not want to discuss such complications here. In any case, it is helpful to distinguish the concepts of lexical sentence and text sentence. However, in order to have categories that enable the analysis of linguistic data, clear and straightforward definitions of both these units would be necessary. Moreover, if both terms have the word *sentence* as a part, they should also
have something in common. At best, there is a clear structural relation-
ship between lexical sentences and text sentences.

The situation in German linguistics is comparable. The official
guidelines ([Deutsche Rechtschreibung], 2018) distinguish between the
syntactic term *Satz* ('sentence') and the grapholinguistic term *Ganzsatz*
('whole sentence').<fnref n="7" /> The latter term, however, is only defined via exam-
ples. The following list of these examples is comprehensive; the Eng-
lish translations (in some cases literal ones (marked by *), to show the
structure of the German example) indicate that the concept of *Ganzsatz*
resembles both Cook's 'sentence' and Nunberg's 'text sentence':

(3) *Examples for the unit 'Ganzsatz' (ibid., p. 74)*

Gestern hat es geregnet.

Du kommst bitte morgen!

Hat er das wirklich gesagt?

Im Hausflur war es still, ich drückte
erwartungsvoll auf die Klingel.

Ich hoffe, dass wir uns bald wieder-
sehen.

Meine Freundin hatte den Zug ver-
säumt; deshalb kam sie eine hal-
be Stunde zu spät.

Niemand kannte ihn.

Auch der Gärtner nicht.

Bitte die Türen schließen und Vor-
sicht bei der Abfahrt des Zuges!

Ob er heute kommt?

Nein, morgen.

Warum nicht?

Gute Reise!

Hilfe!

Yesterday, it rained.

Please come tomorrow!

Did he really say that?

It was quiet in the hallway, I press-
ed the bell expectantly.

I hope to see you again soon.

My friend had missed the train;
that's why she was half an hour
late.

Nobody knew him.

Not even the gardener.

*Please to close the doors and atten-
tion when the train leaves!*

*If he will come today?

No, tomorrow.

Why not?

*Good trip!*

Help!

The *Ganzsatz* seems to be defined here basically as a grapholinguistic unit that begins with a capital letter and ends with a sentence closing mark. Such a definition is explicitly given (for the corresponding unit *graphematic sentence*), e.g., in Schmidt (2016, p. 237), similar to Cook's definition quoted above.

From this brief look at linguistic texts that deal with punctuation, I
conclude that the unit that ends with a full stop in written language (at
least in English and German, but probably in many other writing sys-
tems as well) is different from a syntactic unit, whether it is called sen-
tence, lexical sentence, or clause. If there is a close correspondence be-

<footnote n="7">7. The term *Ganzsatz* was coined by Admoni (1968, p. 150) and is regarded there a syntactic unit. Baudusch (1980, p. 217) adopts this term for the analysis of punctuation, but nevertheless treats it as a syntactic unit. The definitions given by Admoni and Baudusch, in contrast to the concept of [Deutsche Rechtschreibung] (2018), seem to capture only examples that at least contain a verb.</footnote>
tween the two different concepts, they should have similar names; otherwise, they should be clearly distinguishable from each other in terms of expression.

Apart from questions of expression, explicit definitions for all relevant terms are necessary to allow for a sound linguistic analysis. Definitions of terms belong to theories and are therefore theory-specific. At the same time, definitions are language-universal. Once a concept X is defined, the task of the linguist is to formulate the conditions of well-formedness (via rules, constraints, or the like) of instances of X. Such conditions are in principle language-specific. In this way, grammatical instances of X are distinguished from ungrammatical ones. Grammatical instances of X obey all conditions of well-formedness that apply to X in a specific language, whereas an ungrammatical instance violates at least one such condition.

If a theory aims at explaining under which conditions a 'sentence closing mark' can be used, the definitions of the terms used in this explanation must not contain the feature 'sentence closing mark'. In particular, a sentence must not be defined as a unit ending with a sentence closing mark. Otherwise, the explanation would be circular. In the next paragraph, I sketch a theory that allows to formulate an analysis which meets these requirements, based on the conviction that explanations are only possible within specific theories.

## 4. A Theory for Writing Systems Research

Linguistic theories differ in the way they understand language as their object of investigation. According to Katz (1981), three different concepts of language can be identified in linguistic theories: The first is the use of language, i.e., the use that individuals make of certain languages. Use of language is an empirical object, to be investigated with empirical methods. When grapholinguists discuss the relationship between spoken and written language, the discussion is usually at the level of language use. Secondly, if individuals are able to use language, they must have as a prerequisite knowledge of language. Knowledge of language, i.e., the knowledge that individuals have about certain languages, is a mental object that can be explored using mental methods such as those used in psycholinguistics. When grapholinguists emphasize the degree of learnability of theoretical proposals as the main criterion for evaluating the quality of a theory, they argue at the level of knowledge of language. The decisive argument for Katz is that, thirdly, knowledge of language presupposes that the known object has its own theoretical status. The concept of knowledge of language thus presupposes that language has an existence outside of this knowledge. In this sense, lan-
guage is an abstract object. Theoretical linguistics reconstructs these
objects as systems and thus explains them.

Approaches that understand languages as abstract objects form the
paradigm of Linguistic Realism (cf., e.g., Neef, 2018). Based on the gen-
uinely linguistic task of modeling languages as systems, the investiga-
tion of knowledge of language and language use becomes possible in an
interdisciplinary way. However, a number of linguists consider knowl-
edge of language to be the central object of linguistics (they equate lan-
guage with knowledge of language). Such approaches form the para-
digm of Conceptualism (Generative Linguistics belongs to this field).
Still other linguists regard the use of language as the central concept
of linguistics (they equate language with use of language). Such ap-
proaches form the paradigm of Nominalism. I think that it is essential
for linguistic theories to make explicit the respective concept of lan-
guage. My own work falls, naturally, under the paradigm of Linguistic
Realism.

One of the shared assumptions of all linguistic paradigms is that lan-
guages have both regular and irregular data, a characteristic that makes
linguistics a peculiar science. This assumption demands a model of
the language system for these two types of data. Following Bloomfield
(1933), it is a common conception to distinguish within the model a
grammar as the module for treating regular data from a lexicon as the
module for treating irregular data. Within grammar, regularities are
typically divided among the sub-modules phonology, morphology, syn-
tax, and semantics (cf., e.g., Neef, 2018, p. 188).

A central question for grapholinguistic theories that focus on aspects
of the system is ‘What is the relationship of the language system to the
writing system?’ (as a specification of the more pre-theoretical question
of the relationship of spoken language and written language). To my
knowledge, at least four different answers to this question have been
given (in different linguistic paradigms, though):

(4) *What is the relationship between the language system and the writing system?*

a. The writing system is part of grammar (e.g., Eisenberg, 1983; 2013)

b. The writing system is part of the language system (e.g., Bierwisch, 1972, Wiese, 1987)⁸

c. Language system and writing system stand side by side on the
same level (e.g., Neef, 2005, p. 5)

d. The language system is part of the writing system (e.g., Neef, 2012, p. 217)
The basic idea of assumption (4d) is: Typically, a writing system is a system for a specific language system. While a language system can exist without a writing system, a writing system is regularly linked to a given language system. Consequently, a writing system depends on a given language system. For the writing system, the language system counts as given information to which it has access. The constituting part of a writing system is a set of units (characters) which correspond to units of the language system. The module of the writing system model that deals with this aspect is what I call ‘graphematics’. In addition, natural writing systems typically (but not necessarily) contain another module, ‘systematic orthography’, which deals with the correct spelling of grapholinguistic units. This also includes the field of punctuation. The following diagram depicts the general conception of the *Modular Theory of Writing Systems* (cf. Neef, 2015, p. 718).

(5) *Model of the writing system*

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

## 5. Distinguishing the Written Utterance From the Sentence

In a theory of the writing system that takes information of the language system as given information, it is the theory of the language system that provides definitions of terms that are relevant for the analysis of language systems. These terms are readily available for the analysis of writing systems. Syntax theory could provide a definition of the sentence like the following:

(6) *Definition of the syntactic unit sentence*

A sentence is a phrase with a finite verb as its head.

<footnote n="8">8. This is my interpretation of these approaches, which belong to the framework of Generative Linguistics. The authors themselves would possibly choose other interpretations.</footnote>
Such a formal definition is used by various theories of syntax in one way or another. The definition in its current form is not entirely precise, since the terms phrase, finite verb, and head need their own definitions. For the term finite verb, this is less problematic, but for the other two terms it is a problem. What a more precise definition would need to clarify is where the boundaries of a sentence lie: A sentence consists of at least a finite verb, but what other elements could be within the same phrase? For present purposes, I consider the definition sufficient. An analysis of syntax must also give conditions to determine the well-formedness of sentences in specific languages. With respect to English, the following examples represent two grammatical sentences:

(7) *Two grammatical sentences of English*

a. YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

b. WE ALL WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Since sentences are abstract objects, tokens are needed to represent sentences and to enable communication about them. The continuous capital spelling in (7) shall indicate that here not the written form, but the abstract unit sentence is represented. Both sentences are complex in that they contain either a further sentence as in (7a) (YOU WANT A REVOLUTION) or an infinitive construction as in (7b) (TO CHANGE THE WORLD). By definition (6), an infinitive construction is not a sentence but a unit of a different kind.

An analysis of written language then shows that syntactic units occur in written forms. The following examples are again tokens of abstract objects, this time of written objects. I render them in standard orthography.

(8) *Syntactic units in written English*

a. You want a revolution.

b. You say you want a revolution.

c. All the leaves are brown.

d. All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey.

Assuming that all the units in (8) are well-formed with respect to the English writing system, it can be seen that a sentence in written form sometimes starts with an uppercase letter like the sentence YOU WANT A REVOLUTION in (8a) and sometimes it starts with a lowercase letter like the same sentence in (8b). In addition, sometimes a sentence ends with a sentence closing mark like the sentence ALL THE LEAVES ARE BROWN in (8c) and sometimes it does not like the same sentence in (8d). A grapholinguistic task is to determine the distribution of uppercase and lowercase letters as well as the distribution of sentence clos-
ing marks. From the discussed data it is clear that the syntactic unit sentence is not decisive for this purpose. In order to explain the distribution of uppercase letters and sentence closing marks based on a specific unit or domain, the definition of this unit has to be independent of the features requiring explanation.

What is needed is a strictly grapholinguistic unit, which is in principle independent of the syntactic unit sentence. Next, I consider the ontological status of this unit, which is to be captured in a definition. Given that in earlier approaches, the designation *sentence* was often used to denote a concept that belongs in the first place to written language (and given that the lay concept of sentence is closely connected to written forms), it seems promising to consider such definitions as a starting point. Nunberg (1990, pp. 21–22) in the above quote offers three types of definitions of the sentence, namely syntactic, prosodic, and semantic ones. Among the ‘semantic’ definitions, the definition as ‘a group of words that conveys a statement, question, command, or explanation’ is interesting because there is a clear correlation between the sentence closing marks exclamation mark and question mark and the concepts of command and question, respectively. Usually, such concepts are considered pragmatic ones and they are connected to the concept of speech acts in the sense of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969). A core unit of pragmatics is the utterance. It seems natural to relate the grapholinguistic unit under consideration to this pragmatic concept of utterance. Engel (1991, p. 33), e.g., states that texts consist of utterances. Therefore, I term this grapholinguistic unit ‘written utterance’ (German ‘Schreibäußerung’).<fnref n="9" />

Another definition Nunberg (1990, p. 22) lists is that a sentence as a group of words ‘expresses a complete thought’. This is akin to Baudusch’s definition of ‘Ganzsatz’ in Baudusch (1981, p. 210): “Als größte syntaktische Einheit des Sprachsystems stellt der Ganzsatz eine Bedeutungseinheit innerhalb eines größeren Gedankenzusammenhangs dar”.<fnref n="10" /> I think this is an appropriate base to give a definition of the written utterance as a genuine grapholinguistic unit related to the pragmatic unit of utterance:

(9) *Definition of grapholinguistic unit written utterance*

A written utterance is a grapholinguistic unit that is constituted by comprising what can be regarded as a coherent thought.

<footnote n="9">9. Related terms are ‘written act’ (‘Schreibakt’; Stetter, 1989) and the classical term ‘period’ (cf. Rinas, 2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10. “As the largest syntactic unit of the language system, the Ganzsatz represents a unit of meaning within a larger context of thought”.</footnote>
The writer has a certain flexibility what to conceive as a coherent thought, although he is not completely free. Some writers prefer simple thoughts, other prefer complex ones. Examples to illustrate this idea follow in the next paragraph, where there are also examples showing that a coherent thought does not necessarily have to be a complete thought.

## 6. Well-Formedness Conditions of the Written Utterance in Selected Languages

Based on the definition of the written utterance, the task of grapholinguistics is to capture the well-formedness conditions of this unit in specific writing systems. In principle, linguistic theories can be applied to all languages. A sound theory is characterized by the use of a set of terms with explicit definitions. This set of terms allows the analysis of data from different languages. The differences between languages are thus not rooted in the terms used for an analysis but in the analyses themselves. The unit written utterance, for example, is defined in the present context of the Modular Theory of Writing Systems in the way given in (9). In this section, I will begin with two well-formedness conditions of written utterances which hold in the writing system of English and certainly also in a large number of other writing systems. English—in contrast to German—does not have a codified norm of orthography and consequently no codified norm for punctuation. Nevertheless, there is a standard of punctuation holding for the English orthography, although “the use of punctuation is not nearly so standardized as spelling” (Rogers, 2005, p. 15).

### 6.1. Condition on Letters As Initial Elements

(10) *Condition 1* If the first element of a written utterance (not including opening brackets and opening quotation marks) is a letter, it must be an uppercase letter.

This is a condition of well-formedness and not a rule to transform a given input into a different output. This formal characteristic is consistent with the declarative conception of Systematic Orthography as part of the Modular Theory of Writing Systems. With respect to Condition 1, it is irrelevant whether the first word of a written utterance regularly begins with an uppercase letter (as is the case for proper names, for example) or not. A violation of this condition leads to an orthographic error. In this sense, the conditions formulated in the present theory (unlike in Optimality Theory) are conceived as being inviolable. This allows a clear distinction between correct (well-formed) data and false (ill-formed) data. The unit addressed by Condition 1 is the letter and
not the grapheme, because a spelling of a written utterance in English as <THe book is green.> with the supposed complex grapheme <th> written in uppercase would be wrong. The formulation of Condition 1 assumes that the regular appearance of a letter is in the form of its lowercase variant. Well-formedness conditions have to capture when the uppercase variant (as the marked form of a letter) is to be used instead.

An alternative way to formulate Condition 1 would be to state that exactly the first letter of a written utterance has to be an uppercase one. However, this alternative would be empirically inadequate because written utterances may well begin with a series of uppercase letters under certain circumstances, e.g., if the first word is an abbreviation (<USA and Canada are comparable in price.>) or if uppercase letters are used throughout.

In contrast to the works cited in paragraph 3, the need for a specific type of initial letter is not part of the definition of the unit written utterance, but part of its well-formedness conditions. It is therefore to be expected that there are writing systems to which this condition does not apply, although the unit written utterance does play a role. In fact, it is likely that writing systems which are not based on a dual alphabet (like the Roman script) have different kinds of well-formedness conditions in this respect. The Arabic script, for example, has up to four different letter forms (isolated, final, medial, initial; cf. Rogers, 2005, p. 136). Since there is no concept of uppercase letter in this script, Condition 1 cannot hold for written utterances in writing systems based on the Arabic script (but a modified version could). The Chinese script, on the other hand, does not have different letter forms in the present sense, so that there can be no analogue of Condition 1 for writing systems based on the Chinese script. Whether the written utterance is a useful category of analysis for such writing systems is a question to be dealt with independently.

Furthermore, Condition 1 gives a statement for the first letter of a written utterance but it does not determine that the first element of a written utterance has to be a letter. In front of the first letter, there could be a word punctuation sign like an apostrophe or a quotation mark (cf., e.g., Schmidt, 2016, p. 240).

(11) *Written utterances with initial elements other than letters*

a. [T]hat pale-face is my friend.
   'Hope' is a positive word.

b. ... und gab keine Antwort. ... and did not answer.'
   's ist schade um sie. 't's a pity for them.'
   52 volle Wochen hat das Jahr. '52 full weeks is the year.'

The examples in (11a) show that written utterances beginning with the opening part of a punctuation mark that constitutes a symmetrical pair
behave as if this element was not present (cf. ibid., p. 240). The examples in (11b) from [Deutsche Rechtschreibung] (2018, p. 56) show that sometimes the first element of a written utterance is neither a letter nor the opening part of a symmetric punctuation mark; in such cases, the first letter of the written utterance is not subject to Condition 1 (as specified in the formulation of this condition). These examples prove that Cook's definition of the crucial unit as "anything that starts with a capital letter" (Cook, 2004, p. 42) is inadequate. The second part of this definition, which concerns the final element of a 'sentence', is also inadequate, as the following section will show.

## 6.2. Condition on the Final Element

The property in question can be easily translated into a condition of well-formedness for written utterances in the following way:

(12) *Condition 2* The final element of a written utterance has to be an end punctuation mark.

So far, I have used the traditional term 'sentence closing mark' to denote the set of elements full stop, exclamation mark, and question mark. Now this term turns out to be inappropriate, because it is not the unit sentence that is closed by these elements. Therefore, I use the alternative term 'end punctuation mark'.<fnref n="11" /> For the purpose of Condition 2, the term 'end punctuation mark' has to be defined. As the set of elements which fall under this term is finite and, moreover, relatively small, an enumerating definition is possible. I have used this kind of definition already above. Regarding the full stop, however, some refinements are to be made. This term connects an element of a certain form with a certain function. The form is called dot (or point), the function is that of ending a 'sentence', thus a written utterance. The dot, however, also occurs in other functions. Of particular interest is the dot as an abbreviation marker and as a decimal point, respectively. If such a sign is the final one in a written utterance, its presence is sufficient to fulfil Condition 2 above.

(13) *Written utterances with a final dot with a specific function*

a. She knows the rules for periods, commas, semicolons, etc.

b. He knows Queen Elizabeth II.

Therefore, it is better to include the dot in the set of end punctuation marks, with the full stop being only one of the possible functions of this element. Furthermore, a written utterance can have three dots indicat-

<footnote n="11">11. In German, the respective term is *Schlusszeichen*, replacing *Satzschlusszeichen*.</footnote>
ing an ellipsis after its last letter. In some standards of English punctuation, these three dots are sufficient to end a written utterance with, while others require the addition of a fourth dot. From the formulation of Condition 2, three dots would be sufficient, since the final element is then a dot, as required. This explicitly holds true for the German orthography (cf. [Deutsche Rechtschreibung], 2018, p. 101). The following determination of the set of end punctuation marks is valid for English and German, but also for many other orthographic systems:

(14) *Set of end punctuation marks (for English and German)*

dot

exclamation mark

question mark

All these punctuation marks can also occur within written utterances. This is theoretically unproblematic as long as the written utterance is not defined by the presence of specific punctuation marks, as in the approach presented here. For a complete analysis of a punctuation system, the valid conditions must be formulated for each individual punctuation mark.

Orthographic systems have conditions regarding the number of end punctuation marks allowed in a row. In German, for example, in standard orthography only one exclamation or question mark in a row is allowed. In non-standard varieties like in comics or in internet communication, this condition is not valid. In any case, the condition on the number of punctuation marks in a row is independent of the unit written utterance.

For standard orthography, a distinction between two modes to writing is relevant, text mode and list mode (Bredel 2008: 32-34). Condition 2 applies in text mode but not in list mode. The regular mode of writing is text mode, while list mode has special functions. List modal writing pertains to lists, headings, and tables, for example. The title of this paper is conceived by me as its writer as a written utterance. Therefore, it begins with an uppercase letter. But it does not end with an end punctuation mark because it belongs to list mode.

For quoted written utterances, a further note is required. The following examples show that there are differences between the use of the dot compared to that of the exclamation and the question mark. In addition, there are differences between English and German that do not only concern to the form of quotation marks.

(15) *Quoted written utterances*

English

a. He said: "The book is green."

b. "The book is green," he said.

c. "The book is green!" he cried.

d. "The book is green?" he asked.

German

Er sagte: „Das Buch ist grün.“

„Das Buch ist grün“, sagte er.

„Das Buch ist grün!“, schrie er.

„Das Buch ist grün?“, fragte er.
The examples in (15b) shows that under certain circumstances, a written utterance does not have to not end with an end punctuation mark. I do not want to go into further details here and merely note that there seem to be different standards for English regarding the use of quotation marks. To a certain extent, the data in (15) fall within the scope of the formulation of comma conditions.

### 6.3. Condition for Written Utterances Ending With an Exclamation Mark or Question Mark

Writing systems based on the Roman script can use special punctuation marks that are not widely used among such systems. One example is Spanish (cf. Meisenburg, 1996, p. 1440). Written utterances that do not end with a dot but with an exclamation mark or question mark must contain an inverted exclamation mark or inverted question mark as the first element.

#### (16) Written utterances with final exclamation or question marks in Spanish

a. ¿El libro es verde? 'Is the book green?'

b. ¡El libro es verde! 'The book is green!'

A motivation for the introduction of these punctuation marks was that utterances of different function (declarative, exclamation, question) can have the same wording. This property, however, is not sufficient to require such punctuation marks because other languages with the same properties (e.g., German) do not use these punctuation marks. The following Condition X tries to capture the regularities for Spanish, although on closer examination it might turn out that the conditions are more complex.

#### (17) Condition X
If the final element of a written utterance is an exclamation or question mark, the first element has to be an inverted exclamation or question mark, respectively.

Due to the formulation of the conditions, this condition does not conflict with Condition 1 in (10). While Conditions 1 and 2 cover a wide range of orthographic systems, Condition X seems to apply to only one orthographic system, namely Spanish.

### 6.4. Condition on Sentences in Written Utterances

Sequences of sentences can in principle be conceived either as a single written utterance or as different written utterances. This corresponds to the definition of a written utterance as what is generally thought to be a coherent thought. The following German examples from the [Deutsche
Rechtschreibung] (2018, p. 75) are intended to indicate that different punctuation marks are possible between sentences, leading to more or less minor differences in meaning (Nunberg, 1990, p. 13 discusses similar examples for English).

(18) *Different written constructions of sequences of sentences*

a. Im Hausflur war es still. Ich drückte erwartungsvoll auf die Klingel. 'The hallway was quiet. I pressed the bell expectantly.'

b. Im Hausflur war es still, ich drückte erwartungsvoll auf die Klingel. 'It was quiet in the hallway, I pressed the bell expectantly.'

c. Im Hausflur war es still; ich drückte erwartungsvoll auf die Klingel. 'It was quiet in the hallway; I pressed the bell expectantly.'

On the other hand, a single sentence may be divided among different written utterances. For such a constellation, I will propose a further condition of well-formedness for written utterances that applies to sequences of written utterances. This condition goes beyond the scope of traditional definitions of (written) sentences and refers to the formal relationship between the syntactic unit sentence and the grapholinguistic unit written utterance. Such a condition will hardly be considered in approaches that do not distinguish between these two types of units but rather combine them into a broad concept of 'sentence'. The formulation of the following condition is only tentative; detailed studies are necessary to obtain a clearer picture of the regularities. I formulate this condition with regard to the writing systems of English and German, but its scope is certainly broader.

(19) *Condition 3* If a sentence is divided over more than one written utterance, the first of the written utterances concerned must contain a construction which has the status of a well-formed sentence.

In the regular case, a sentence is not divided among successive written utterances. Gallmann (1985, p. 44) for German and Nunberg (1990, p. 22) for English give examples that contradict this regularity in a way that is covered by Condition 3. Coincidentally, all the examples seem to come from car advertising.

(20) *Examples illustrating Condition 3*

a. Er läuft. Und läuft. Und läuft. 'It is running. And running. And running.' Er läuft. Weil er einen starken Motor hat. 'It is running. Because it has a strong engine.'

b. The L9000 delivers everything you wanted in a luxury sedan. With more power. At a price you can afford.
Nunberg (ibid., p. 22) takes example (20b) as evidence that a written utterance ('text-sentence' in his terms) "need not be a lexical [= syntactic] sentence in its own right, notwithstanding the fulminations of schoolroom grammarians". This observation applies to German as well. But according to Condition 3, writers are not free to divide a sentence among several written utterances at will. If the first of the written utterances in question does not contain a well-formed sentence, the written construction is questionable, as illustrated by the following construed examples:

(21) *Sequences of written utterances violating Condition 3*

a. I watch. The children play.

b. The. Book. Is. Green.

In itself, the written form <The children play.> in (21a) is a perfect written utterance. It becomes an error if it is meant to be part of a sentence, the rest of that sentence being realized in a preceding written utterance that contains another part of the same sentence which in itself is not a well-formed sentence. The same is true for the four written utterances in (21b), although it may be more difficult to imagine contexts in which they might occur; cases at issue could be answers to appropriate questions. Looking at Cook's (2004, p. 42) definition of sentence, (21) could only be said to be sequences of two or four 'sentences', since all forms at issue begin with an uppercase letter and end with a 'full stop'. I do not see any possibility to describe the flawedness of these written examples within Cook's approach.

However, examples like the ones in (21) can still be found in language use. A particularly nice example is a quote from Suvarna Baheti, posted on November 26, 2017 on www.yourquote.in.

Grammatically, the quote consists of only one sentence. Grapholinguistically, it is conceived as a sequence of four written utterances, each beginning with an uppercase letter and ends with a dot (two of them also have three ellipsis dots at the end before the final dot). The first of the written utterances does not contain a grammatical sentence. Thus, the written utterances obey Conditions 1 and 2, but the sequence of written utterances violates Condition 3.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>
However, instead of discarding Condition 3 in the face of examples such as Baheti's poem, I will consider the scope of orthographic conditions in general. In the German-speaking countries, the official rules are only binding in certain areas:

> Das folgende amtliche Regelwerk, mit einem Regelteil und einem Wörterverzeichnis, regelt die Rechtschreibung innerhalb derjenigen Institutionen (Schule, Verwaltung), für die der Staat Regelungskompetenz hinsichtlich der Rechtschreibung hat. Darüber hinaus hat es zur Sicherung einer einheitlichen Rechtschreibung Vorbildcharakter für alle, die sich an einer allgemein gültigen Rechtschreibung orientieren möchten (das heißt Firmen, speziell Druckereien, Verlage, Redaktionen – aber auch Privatpersonen). ([Deutsche Rechtschreibung], 2018, S. 7)<fnref n="12" />

This means that there are areas of language use for which the official rules of the German orthography are not binding. In particular, a writer may do anything he likes in private correspondence with regard to orthography. A limiting factor may be that he wants to be understood by a potential reader. Other relevant areas are advertising and works of art, areas where playing with language and playing with rules of orthography has its own value. With regard to languages that do not have an explicitly codified norm of spelling, the implicit norm is consequently more reliably derived from administrative text than, for example, from poems.

Therefore, I maintain that Condition 3 applies to writing systems such as English and German, but the standard writing system does not have authority in a number of areas of written language use. Autonomous sub-systems may develop among certain communities as in chat communication. Such non-standard systems deserve linguistic analysis, but they should not be equated with standard orthography.

## 7. Conclusion

When the question is asked: "What is it that ends with a full stop?" the scientific answer from grapholinguistics is not: "A sentence." The term *sentence* should be reserved for a structural unit in syntax, while the unit in question is an original grapholinguistic one. It is essential to distinguish between these two units, as has occasionally been done in grapholinguistic research before in one way or another. Since this unit

<footnote n="12">12. "The following official set of rules, with a rule section and a dictionary, regulates spelling within those institutions (school, administration) for which the state has regulatory competence with regard to spelling. Furthermore, in order to ensure a uniform spelling, it serves as a model for all those who wish to orient themselves towards a generally valid spelling (i.e., companies, especially printers, publishers, editorial offices—but also private individuals)."</footnote>
is more closely related to the utterance as a pragmatic unit than to the sentence as a syntactic unit, it should not bear the designation *sentence* in its name but the designation *utterance*. In the present paper, I propose the designation *written utterance*. A written utterance is a grapholinguistic unit which is constituted by comprising what can be conceived as a coherent thought. The writer has a certain freedom in what he considers a coherent thought, but there are limitations. If a sequence of two sentences is conceived as one coherent thought, this sequence can sometimes be interpreted differently than if it were conceived as two different coherent thoughts.

If the written utterance is defined in this way, different writing systems can be analyzed in terms of the well-formedness conditions that apply to them. For the writing systems of English and German, the respective conditions require that the first element (disregarding brackets and quotation marks), if it is a letter, has to be an uppercase letter and the final element an end punctuation mark. Thus, in the present conception these properties are treated as well-formedness conditions, while other approaches typically consider them as defining features (of concepts termed, e.g., *text sentence* or *Ganzsatz*). These different conceptions have significant consequences for 'errors'. If a written utterance, as defined here, immediately begins with a lowercase letter, it is characterized by a spelling error. If, on the other hand, one takes the feature of the initial uppercase letter as a defining criterion, everything that does not begin with an uppercase letter does not fall under the term in question. With such an approach, it would be inadequate to mark a supposed 'text sentence' beginning with a lowercase letter as misspelled, because the unit in question would not even meet the defining criteria of a text sentence.

Different writing system can have different well-formedness conditions for written utterances. Spanish is a case in question because it has a special condition for such written utterances that end with an exclamation mark or question mark. In addition, English and German have slight differences with respect to quoted written utterances. Based on definitions such as that of the written utterance in (9), a contrastive analysis of writing systems is feasible. Defined terms form the core of a theory, which must be kept constant for the analyses. Differences among writing systems can then be revealed in terms of the well-formedness conditions. Furthermore, the concept of the written utterance provides a frame for the analysis of conditions for other punctuation marks. In Neef (2020), I analyze the comma in the German writing system by using the concept of written utterance.<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="13">13. The text was made with the help of DeepL, which is gratefully acknowledged.</footnote>
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# What Is a Written Word? And if So, How Many?

Martin Evertz-Rittich

*Abstract.* The linguistic unit *word* seems to be an intuitive notion for language users. However, linguists have failed so far to provide a uniform definition of that unit. Instead, there are definitions pertaining to different subsystems of language. In this paper, we will discuss how we can define the unit word in writing. We will start by examining definitions of the graphematic word in alphabetical writing systems such as German and English. We will then discuss how the written word relates to other suprasegmental units in writing systems, such as the syllable and the foot, and to which spoken unit or units a written word corresponds to. Finally, we will show that the discussed definitions of the graphematic word are not employable universally since in alphabetical writing systems definitions of the graphematic word pertain to interword spacing. By examining the Chinese and Japanese writing systems as examples, we will try to explain why these writing systems do not mark words by spaces and discuss whether there are graphematic words in these writing systems. Based on these considerations we will provide a tentative universal definition of graphematic words.

## 1. Introduction

Although the notion *word* seems to be an intuitive unit for language users—it might even be “the most basic of all linguistic units” (Taylor, 2015, p. 1)—it is a notoriously elusive concept in linguistics. This is due to the various criteria of wordhood in each linguistic subsystem, which often contradict each other. For instance, a phonological word, which (among other criteria) must exhibit exactly one primary stress, is not the same as a syntactic word, which (among other criteria) is moveable in a sentence (cf. *fish and chips* are three syntactical words but two phonological ones {fish and}{chips} with an unstressed *and*, cf. ibid., p. 7). Moreover, the criteria to identify a word in most subsystems of language are

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>
often quite subtle and sometimes not even unambiguous (cf., e.g., the
criteria for wordhood in semantics).

When it comes to the written word, however, things seem to be quite
easy. Most often, the graphematic<fnref n="1" /> word is defined as a string of letters
bordered by spaces. And that seems to be the only noteworthy thing
about that linguistic unit.

In this paper, I will show that there is more to the graphematic word.
I will begin with the seemingly easy definition of the graphematic word
and show that it is actually quite problematic. I will discuss the def-
inition of the graphematic word in alphabetical writing systems, such
as the writing systems of English and German, and show that the de-
finitions found in the literature are insufficient. Based on typographic
considerations, I present a promising alternative. In the next part, I will
discuss the role of the graphematic word in the graphematic hierarchy
and which properties can be derived from it. After that I will discuss the
correspondence of the graphematic word to units in spoken language,
such as the phonological and syntactical word (see above). Lastly, I will
have a look at two writing systems that do not mark graphematic words
by inter-word spacing: Japanese and Chinese. I will discuss why this is
the case and whether there are graphematic words in these writing sys-
tems at all. In the conclusion, I will revisit the definition of the graphe-
matic word presented in section 2 in light of the findings in section 5.

## 2. Definitions in Alphabetical Writing Systems

We will start our endeavor by examining definitions of graphematic
words in alphabetical writing systems such as English or German. Prob-
ably the simplest definition is the one provided in (1).

(1) A graphematic word is a string of graphemes that is bordered by
spaces and may not be interrupted by spaces.

This kind of definition is quite common in the literature (e.g., Coulmas,
1996, p. 550; Jacobs, 2005, p. 22; Fuhrhop, 2008, 193f). This definition
seems to be intuitively correct and for most linguistic approaches—even
grapho-linguistic ones—this definition suffices (cf., e.g., Evertz, 2018,
p. 21). However, closer examination reveals that it is indeed problem-
atic.

<footnote n="1">1. In this paper, I will use the notion *graphematic* when conferring to a writing system. I refrain from using the term *orthographic* in this context since the orthography of a given writing system is the conventionalized spelling of that writing system and thus a subset.</footnote>
But before we can begin discussing the definition, the terms within it must be clarified. In alphabetical writing systems, there are two traditions of defining the notion *grapheme*:

- A grapheme is a written unit that corresponds to exactly one phoneme (e.g., Wiese 2007).

- A grapheme is the smallest contrastive unit within a given writing system (e.g., Henderson, 1985, Kohrt, 1985, Eisenberg, 2006, Rogers, 2005).

While the first one defines the grapheme by its correspondence to phonological units, the second definition pertains to the distribution of the grapheme and thus is independent of phonology. The second definition closely corresponds to its counterpart in phonology, the definition of the *phoneme*. That entails that the grapheme, just like the phoneme, can be identified by minimal pair analyses.

The other term in the definition in (1) is the notion *space*. According to Bredel (2008, 31–32; 2011, 19–20) we can imagine the writing space as a threefold structure consisting of segmental slots, linear slots and two-dimensional slots, cf. Fig. 1.

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Writing Space (Bredel, 2011, p. 31; my translation)</figcaption></figure>

Segmental slots are spaces that can be filled by certain graphic elements, e.g., letters. Linear writing spaces are horizontally oriented strings of slots. A two-dimensional writing space is a vertically oriented sequence of linear writing spaces (cf. Bredel, 2008, p. 19). A space according to (1) can be defined as an empty segmental slot.

Now that the terms in (1) are reasonably well clarified, we can have a closer look at this definition. Consider the examples in (2).

(2) <you.>, <you?>, <you!>
<Smiths'> (e.g., in *the Smiths' house*), <mother-in-law>
Let us start with the examples in (2a). According to the definition in (1), a word starts and ends with a grapheme. The examples in (2a), however, end in punctuation marks. These are not graphemes—regardless which definition of grapheme we employ: punctuation marks do not correspond to phonemes and they are not contrastive on the word level.

Thus, a word like `<you>` corresponds to the definition in (1), the examples in (2a), however, do not because they end in a punctuation mark.

If the definition in (1) is understood as being exhaustive (only those entities described in the definition qualify as graphematic words), the examples in (2a) are no graphematic words. But if they are not, what are they? If the definition in (1) is not exhaustive, it is not complete and additionally, the question arises, if the examples in (2a) are one or more words.

Similar problems arise with the examples in (2b). The word-status of `<Smiths'>` is unclear as is the question whether a hyphenated word (?) like `<mother-in-law>` constitutes one or more graphematic words.

One alternative to the definition in (1) is proposed by Zifonun, Hoffmann, and Strecker (1997, p. 259), my translation:

(3) A graphematic word is a string of graphemes that is preceded by a space and may not be interrupted by spaces.

This definition only seemingly solves the problems we have encountered so far. The examples in (2a) constitute according to this definition exactly one graphematic word, `<you>`, because the "string of graphemes" is interrupted by a punctuation mark in each case. The same is true for the first example in (2b). This string of graphemes is interrupted by the apostrophe. The case of the second example in (2b) is more complicated, however. According to the definition in (3), `<mother-in-law>` constitutes exactly one graphematic word: `<mother>`. The status of `<-in-law>` is unclear.

Moreover, there are examples like in (4) that do not only end but also begin with punctuation marks.

(4) `<"you">`, `<(you)>`, `<¿tú?>` (Span.)

Thus, the definition in (3) is also problematic.

The solution I propose is based on typographic considerations by Bredel (2008; 2011). Based on the model of writing space (cf. Fig. 1) we can distinguish between two classes of punctuation marks and graphemes: *fillers* and *clitics*. Fillers can independently fill a segmental slot whereas clitics need the support of a filler.

Bredel (2008) proposes two criteria by which fillers and clitics can be distinguished. The first one is symmetry. One element is called symmetric, if elements of the same class can stand adjacent to the left and
right side of that element. Fillers are symmetric, clitics are not. The second criterium is the ability of an element to appear at the beginning and the end of a line. Fillers can appear at the end and the beginning of a line, clitics cannot.

According to Bredel (2011, pp. 20–23) letters, numbers, apostrophes and hyphens are fillers; periods, colons, semi-colons, commas, brackets, question marks, quotation marks and exclamation marks are clitics.

Based on this distinction, we propose the following definition of graphematic words in alphabetical writing systems such as German and English (Evertz, 2016a, pp. 391–392); based on works of Bredel; my translation):

(5) A graphematic word is a sequence of slot-filler-pairs surrounded by empty slots in which at least one filler must be a letter.

The supplement to the definition (at least one filler being a letter) was added to exclude numbers from the scope of the definition. Let us examine one of our examples in light of this definition, cf. Fig. 2.

<table><caption>FIGURE 2. Slot-filler-pairs of <mother-in-law!></caption><thead><tr><th>1</th><th>2</th><th>3</th><th>4</th><th>5</th><th>6</th><th>7</th><th>8</th><th>9</th><th>10</th><th>11</th><th>12</th><th>13</th><th>14</th><th>15</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td></td><td>m</td><td>o</td><td>t</td><td>h</td><td>e</td><td>r</td><td>-</td><td>i</td><td>n</td><td>-</td><td>l</td><td>a</td><td>w!</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

In Fig. 2 there are 15 segmentals slots. Slots 2 to 14 are occupied, slots 1 and 15 are empty. Slots 2 to 7, 9 to 10 and 12 to 13 are occupied by one letter each, slot 14 is occupied by a letter and a punctuation mark. Slots 8 and 11 are each occupied by one non-letter filler. Thus, <mother-in-law> meets all requirements for a graphematic word according to the definition in (5).

The consequence of the definition in (5) is that we can distinguish between the graphematic word proper and its surface form. Clitics are only part of the graphematic surface whereas fillers are part of the graphematic surface *and* of the graphematic word proper. This is true for all fillers: letters and non-letters (cf. ibid., pp. 391–392).

In the case of the examples in (2a) and (4), the graphematic word proper consists of the fillers: <you>. The clitics (in these cases the punctuation marks) are part of the graphematic surface. Thus, the examples in (2a) and (4) are graphematic surface forms of exactly one graphematic word (cf. ibid., pp. 391–392).

The examples in (2b) consist exclusively of fillers. This means that all characters (letters and non-letters alike) make up the graphematic word proper. The non-letter fillers are part of the graphematic word since
they have important roles within it. In the case of <mother-in-law> (cf. Fig. 2), the non-letter fillers indicate that the morphological processing is not completed after <mother> and <in> but that everything between the empty slots must be processed as whole (Evertz 216a, 391). In the case of <Smiths'> as in *the Smiths' house*, the apostrophe indicates a zero morpheme (Bunčić, 2004, p. 190). A consequence is, however, that <Smiths'> and <Smith> are two different graphematic words.

This definition is very promising for writing systems such as English and German. We will see however, that it is a poor candidate for a universal definition, cf. section 5.

### 3. Properties of Graphematic Words

The graphematic word is a unit in writing systems that issuprasegmental, i.e., it is larger than a single segment. It is not the only suprasegmental unit in alphabetical writing systems. The graphematic syllable is well-established in psycho- and grapholinguistic literature (e.g., Butt and Eisenberg, 1990; Domahs, Bleser, and Eisenberg, 2001; Eisenberg, 2006; Primus, 2003; Rollings, 2004; Roubah and Taft, 2001; Weingarten, 2004) and more recently, the graphematic foot gained attention (Evertz, 2016a,b; 2018; 2019; Evertz and Primus, 2013; Fuhrhop and Peters, 2013; Primus, 2010; Ryan, 2018). With these units it is possible to constitute a graphematic counterpart of the phonological hierarchy, cf. Fig. 3.

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. The graphematic hierarchy (Evertz, 2018; Evertz and Primus, 2013</figcaption></figure>
This hierarchy is—just as its phonological counterpart—accompanied by the *Strict Layer Hypothesis* (Nespor and Vogel, 1986). This hypothesis states in its strong form that each unit of a non-terminal category is composed of one or more units of the immediately lower category. The second part of the Strict Layer Hypothesis states that a unit of a given level of the hierarchy is exhaustively contained in the superordinate unit of which it is part (ibid., p. 7). Previous work showed that this hypothesis also holds in graphematics, although it seems that the first principle is violable in case of so called extrametrical syllables (cf. Evertz, 2018).

A consequence of these considerations are that:

- a graphematic word consists of at least one graphematic foot and

- a graphematic foot consists of at least one graphematic syllable.

Since larger units in a hierarchy are made up of the immediately smaller units, the larger units inherit traits of the smaller units. For instance, if a syllable must adhere to certain well-formedness requirements and if a foot is constituted by syllables, the syllables of the foot must adhere to the very same requirements. The same is true on every level of the hierarchy. This means that a graphematic word must adhere to well-formedness requirements of graphematic feet and graphematic syllables.

This relationship can be exemplified by so called *minimal words* (Evertz, 2016b). Consider following examples:

(6) in/inn, oh/owe, no/know, by/bye/buy, so/sew, to/two, we/wee, or/ore/oar, be/bee, I/aye/eye

The pairs or triplets in (6) are homophones. Interesting is that function words can obviously be shorter than content words. This can be described by the so called *three-letter-rule* (e.g., Cook, 2004, p. 57):

(7) Content words must have more than two letters.

The existence of a minimality restriction like the three-letter-rule can be explained with the help of the graphematic hierarchy.

Just like in phonology, we can expect that function words behave differently than content words. For instance, while content words always constitute phonological words, which exhibit exactly one prime stress, function words can be unstressed. In phonology, this can be described by following constraint:

(8) LEXWD = PRDWD: Every lexical word corresponds to a prosodic word (ibid., p. 101).

Let us assume that this constraint also holds for writing systems:
(9) Every lexical word corresponds to a well-formed graphematic word.

The difference in the pair and triples in (6) can now be explained by the well-formedness constraints the graphematic word inherits from the smaller units in the hierarchy.

In phonology, feet must conform to a certain well-formedness constraint, called *foot-binarity* (McCarthy and Prince, 1995, pp. 320–324):

(10) **FOOT-BINARITY:** Feet are binary at a syllabic or moraic level of analysis.

This means that a well-formed phonological foot must consist of two syllables or one heavy syllable. Evertz (2016b; 2018) shows that a similar constraint holds for graphematics. A graphematic foot must consist of either one heavy graphematic syllable or two graphematic syllables (of any weight). Whether a graphematic syllable is heavy or light depends on its syllabic structure. In order to be heavy, a graphematic syllable must have a rhyme that dominates at least two segments and in total the syllable must consist of at least three segments (Evertz, 2016b, p. 208; see the fist syllable in Fig. 3 as an example of a heavy graphematic syllable).

Although the three-letter-rule is not wrong, the explanation provided here is superior in explanatory strength. Moreover it is empirically superior. If having three letters was the only restriction for graphematic words, there should be more words like `<gnu>`, which end in a single vowel letter but still consist of three letters. Words of this type, however, are quite rare (cf. ibid.).<fnref n="2" />

Even the fact that content words have at least one vowel letter can be derived from the graphematic hierarchy: A graphematic word consists of at least one foot. A graphematic foot consists of at least one graphematic syllable. And a graphematic syllable must have a core dominating at least one vowel letter (e.g., Evertz, 2018; Fuhrhop and Peters, 2013; Primus, 2003).

There are, however, exceptions to the well-formedness constraints described here. Graphematic words that systematically violate these constraints are abbreviations:

<footnote n="2">2. Evertz (2016b, p. 193) reports that only 20.4% of monosyllabic phonological words ending in a vowel are written as a monosyllabic graphematic word ending in a single vowel letter. Of these 20.4%, 4.6% are function words, 9.2% are loanwords, interjections or abbreviations, leaving a rest of 6.7%. Monosyllabic phonological words ending in a vowel are rather coded with the help of so called mute letters like in *blow*, *bee*, *high*. Evertz (ibid., pp. 207–208) argues that these mute letters add graphematic weight in order to meet the weight restriction for graphematic feet.</footnote>
A *morphological word* can be described as an entity that inflects uniformly (Wurzel, 2000, p. 36) and is constituted by word building rules (Jacobs, 2005). Thus, our example *Tierart* is a morphological word since it is constituted according to the composition rules of German and is inflecting uniformly: *Tierarten* (Pl.) vs. *Tierearten*. Fuhrhop (2008, p. 224) comes to the conclusion that the morphological word is congruent with the graphematic word in German.<fnref n="3" />

A *syntactic word* can be defined as a syntactically free form that is commonly designated $X^0$ in *generative grammar* (cf. Gallmann, 1999). This entails that a syntactical word is permutable in a sentence and may not be interrupted by linguistic material. Gallmann (ibid.) and Fuhrhop (2008) come to the conclusion that the syntactic word and the graphematic word are almost congruent<fnref n="4" /> in German.

From a writer's perspective the congruity of graphematic words with syntactical and morphological words means that phrases must be realized as single graphematic words with empty slots in between. Complex morphological words, however, must be realized as one graphematic word without empty slots in between. Conversely, from a reader's perspective this means that a slot-filler-sequence without spaces must be interpreted morphologically and slot-filler-sequences with spaces must be interpreted syntactically. This can be exemplified by *wohlgeraten* 'great, outstanding' vs. *wohl geraten* 'probably guessed'. Because there are no empty slots in *wohlgeraten*, it must be interpreted as one graphematic word and therefore as one morphological word. And because there is an empty slot in *wohl geraten*, this expression must be interpreted as two graphematic words and therefore two syntactic words, a phrase in this case.

The case for English is not as straightforward as in German. This is due to the fact that there is a considerable stylistic freedom in the spelling of compound words. For instance, the website *Wiktionary* lists three spellings of *secondhand*: <secondhand>, <second-hand> and <second hand>. However, as the same website points out, <secondhand> and <second-hand> "may be preferred spellings for the adjective meaning 'not new', to avoid confusion with the noun 'second hand' referring to the hand of a clock or watch."<fnref n="5" /> This means that

<footnote n="3">3. Whether there are exceptions to the congruity of morphological and graphematic words is debatable. Wurzel (2000, p. 37) points to the case of *(mit seiner) Langenweile* ('(with his) boredom (Dative)' a variant of *Langeweile*. This (not too common) variant may suggest that *Langeweile* is actually consisting of two morphological words but one graphematic word.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Examples include particle verbs like *anfangen* 'to begin' in sentences like *er fängt an zu schreiben* 'he starts writing'.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/second_hand#English, retrieved August 21st, 2020.</footnote>
spellings without empty slots are quite clearly interpreted as one mor-
phological word while spellings with empty slots can have ambiguous
readings. Evertz (2016a, p. 394) points to the example *old furniture dealer*:
an <old-furniture dealer> is a dealer of old furniture, an <old furniture-
dealer> is a furniture dealer who is elderly.

Thus it seems that just like in the German writing system, the graphem-
matic word is congruent with the morphological and syntactical word
in English although the English writing system allows more variation in
writing compound words.

5. Graphematic Words Without Spaces?

So far we examined the graphematic word in English and German as ex-
amples of alphabetical writing systems that use empty slots to mark the
beginning and end of graphematic words. However, there are writing
systems, alphabetical and non-alphabetical, that do not use empty slots
in that way. In this section, we will have a look at two examples and
discuss why in these cases there are no empty slots and whether we still
can find reasons to assume that the graphematic word is a relevant unit
in these writing system.

5.1. The Case of Japanese

The Japanese writing system (JWS) is regarded as one the most complex
writing systems in the world (e.g., Joyce, 2011). Sproat (2010, p. 47) for
instance writes that “Japanese is a complex system, certainly the most
complex writing system in use today and a contender for the title of the
most complex system ever.” The reason for this consensus regarding its
complexity is the multitude of scripts employed in the Japanese writ-
ing system. In the contemporary JWS there are five separate scripts:
morphographic kanji, the mora-based (Ratcliffe, 2001) scripts hiragana
and katakana, the phonemic Roman alphabet rōmaji and Arabic numerals
(e.g., Joyce and Masuda, 2018, p. 182).

The different scripts are used for different purposes. Kanji are gen-
erally used to represent native and Sino-Japanese content words like
nouns, the stem of verbs etc. (ibid., p. 184). For instance, the com-
pound 日本語 nihongo 'Japanese' consists of three kanji 日本 'Japan' and
語 'language'. Hiragana, on the other hand, generally represent function
words such as auxiliaries, and inflectional endings (ibid., p. 184). In
this use they are referred to as 送り仮名 okurigana 'accompanying letters'.
An example for okurigana are the hiragana following the kanji in 見る
miru '(to) see' vs. 見た mita 'saw'. Katakana are usually used to write
non-Chinese loanwords, foreign names, animal and plant species names,
onomatopoeic expressions, and for emphasis and as glosses. Rōmaji are similarly used to represent non-Japanese words and names, especially within advertising and mass media. And finally, Arabic numerals are used to represent numbers, particular in financial and scientific contexts (Joyce and Masuda, 2018, p. 184).

While on first sight this multitude of different scripts might seem confusing, it can actually be beneficial for readers as they enable them to distinguish lexical content from grammatical elements (Joyce and Masuda, 2016). This is because of the visual distinctiveness of the three scripts the JWS mainly uses. First, kanji are visually salient because of their complexity. In contrast to hiragana and katakana, which are usually written with no more than six strokes (Kajii, Nazir, and Osaka, 2001, p. 2504), kanji can consist of up to 29 strokes with an average of 10.47 strokes (Joyce, Hodošček, and Nishina, 2012, p. 256; Joyce and Masuda, 2018, p. 186). Since these salient units usually represent lexical content, it can be identified at first glance. Second, hiragana are also easily identifiable: they consist of relatively few strokes, which tend to be curved, in contrast to katakana, which consist of more or less the same amount of strokes, which, however, tend to be straight. Thus, grammatical elements, which are usually represented by hiragana, are also quite easily identifiable. Reading experiments confirmed that readers can distinguish the three types of characters effortless, even in peripheral vision (Osaka, 1989; 1992). Given the foreignness in appearance of rōmaji and Arabic numerals, it is quite reasonable to assume that they too can be distinguished easily by readers of the JWS.

Let us demonstrate the interplay of the different scripts within the JWS, cf. the example in (12).

(12) Example for the interplay of different scripts in the JWS (Shibatani, 1990, p. 129)

<table><tr><td>花子</td><td>は</td><td>あの</td><td>ビル</td><td>で</td><td>働</td><td>いている</td><td>OL</td><td>です。</td></tr><tr><td>Hanako</td><td>wa</td><td>ano</td><td>biru</td><td>de</td><td>hatari-</td><td>i-te-i-ru</td><td>ooreu</td><td>desu</td></tr><tr><td>Hanako</td><td>TOPIC</td><td>that</td><td>building</td><td>at</td><td>work-</td><td>ing</td><td>OL</td><td>is</td></tr><tr><td colspan="10">'Hanako is an OL (office lady) working in that building'</td></tr></table>

Content words (in one case a verb stem) are represented by kanji (花子, 働), by katakana (ビル) or rōmaji (OL). Since in Japanese inflectional endings are following the stem, word beginnings coincide with characters that usually represent lexical content, especially kanji (cf. Rogers, 2005, p. 66). Thus, characters frequently appearing in the word beginning may serve as effective segmentation cues to signal word boundaries.

This points to the conclusion that graphematic words do not need to be explicitly marked by empty slots in Japanese, since the words are already marked graphotactically. This conclusion is supported by psycholin-
guistic findings. Sainio, Hyönä, Bingushi, and Bertram (2007) found that interword spacing facilitated Japanese readers—but only when they read a text composed of hiragana only. In normal Japanese texts, which mainly consist of kanji and hiragana, interword spacing did not facilitate reading.

## 5.2. The Case of Chinese

Like the Japanese writing system, the Chinese writing system (CWS) does not display empty slots between individual characters, which represent most likely a morpheme or a syllable, cf. (13).

(13) Example of a Chinese sentence without interword spacing
中国这几年的变化的确很大。

The sentence neither displays spacing between words or phrases nor does it display graphotactical cues to word boundaries like in the JWS. Yet there are linguistic units greater than single syllables, morphemes or characters. (14) provides a translation of the sentence in (13), in which syntactic words are separated.

(14) Translation of the sentence in (13) (Coulmas, 2003, p. 59)

中国 这 几 年 的 变化 的 确 很 大。
Zhōngguó zhè jǐ nián de biànhuà díquè hěn dà
China these several years GEN change really very big
‘China underwent big changes during the past several years’

In the CWS, syntactic words can be written with one or more characters, as seen in (14). A word comprising two characters is not necessarily a compound word. For instance, in 蚬蚓 qiūyín 'earthworm' neither character represents a morpheme but both characters combined do (Chen, 1996, p. 46). An example for the difference between a phrase and a syntactic word written with two characters is the contrast between 红鸟 hóngniǎo 'red bird' and 红花 hónghuā 'safflower' (examples from Zhang, 1985, p. 64 as cited in Packard, 2000, p. 15). Notice that in both cases the first character is 红, which in isolation denotes 'red'. In 红鸟, there are two syntactic words because both components can be substituted by nearly any adjective and any noun while it still retains its compositional meaning. In 红花, on the other hand, the idiomatic meaning gets lost by substituting one component (ibid., p. 15).

The Common Words in Contemporary Chinese Research Team (2008) analyzed a corpus consisting of 56,008 words and found that 6% of Chinese words are written with a single-character, 72% are 2-character words, 12% are written with 3 characters, and 10% are 4-character
words; fewer than 0.3% of Chinese words are written with more than 4 characters. Analyzing the token frequencies, 70.1% of words are written with a single character, 27.1% are 2-character words, 1.9% are 3-character words, 0.8% are 4-character words, and 0.1% are words longer than 4 characters.

This means that 94% of words (types) are longer than one character and even by taking tokens into account, nearly 30% of words are still larger than a single character. This leads to the question why the CWS does not display empty slots between words and whether there is a graphematic counterpart to the syntactic word in Chinese.

One reason for the lack of interword spacing might lie in the development of the CWS. Classical Chinese was mostly monosyllabic and monomorphematic, thus words and characters were almost congruent (Hoosain, 1992, p. 119; Li, Zang, Liversedge, and Pollatsek, 2015, p. 232). Therefore, the writing system of Classical Chinese had simply no need for interword separation.

Packard (1998; 2000) mentions the fact that there was no term for the syntactic word in the Chinese language until the concept was imported from the West at the beginning of the twentieth century. This new term is called 词 cí 'syntactic word'. It describes a concept that is quite different from the older word that is still used in non-linguistic contexts when talking about word-like entities in Chinese, 字 zì, which can be translated as 'morpheme-syllable' or 'character' (Hoosain, 1992, p. 112).

A reason why interword spacing did not develop over time in the Chinese writing system (CWS) might be due to the linguistic features of contemporary Chinese. It is noteworthy that modern Chinese almost completely lacks inflection. Thus, unlike in the JWS, there is no need for a non-morphemic script for grammatical information in the CWS. Moreover, Hoosain (ibid., pp. 118–120) reports that morphemes in Chinese can be free or bound. However, there are degrees of freedom as the free-bound status of a morpheme can vary by context, register and dialect. Lastly, bound morphemes can appear before or after a free morpheme, unlike in many other languages which do only allow bound morphemes to either appear before or after a free morpheme (Chen, 1996, p. 46). According to Hoosain (1992, p. 120), these factors contribute to a “fluidity of word boundaries” in the mind of Chinese speakers. Thus, a distinction between morphemes and words in the CWS would not be appropriate. Packard (2000, pp. 17–18), however, disputes this argument. He argues that Chinese speakers might only be uncertain in their metalinguistic judgment but will have no problems in actual language usage.

As an interesting side note, Meng et al. (2019) compared the efficiency of deep learning-based Chinese natural language processing algorithms. They benchmarked neural word-based models which rely
on word segmentation against neural character-based models which do not involve word segmentation in four tasks (language modeling, machine translation, sentence matching/paraphrase and text classification). They found that character-based models consistently outperformed word-based models.

While the linguistic argument of Hoosain (1992) is under dispute, there is however consensus about the average word length in Chinese. As reported further above, ca. 78% of word types and ca. 97% of word tokens are one or two characters in length. This leads Li, Zang, Liversedge, and Pollatsek (2015) to another interesting explanation why there is no interword spacing in the CWS: the variance in word length in Chinese is reduced relative to the word length variability in alphabetic languages. The number of potential sites within a character string at which word segmentation might occur is therefore significantly reduced in Chinese. Consequently, decisions about word boundaries might be less of a challenge in Chinese than in English (given English had no empty slots). Thus, word spacing may have been less of a necessity for efficient reading in Chinese (ibid., pp. 232–233).

These considerations are supported by psycholinguistic findings. The interspersing of spaces (or other highlighting) between syntactic words does not facilitate reading Chinese, but did not interfere with reading in adult readers as well (Bai et al., 2008; Inhoff, Liu, Wang, and Fu, 1997). Inserting a space after a word facilitates its processing but inserting a space before a word did not facilitate processing and in fact may even interfere with its integration into sentential meaning as indicated by total reading times (Li and Shen, 2013; Liu and Li, 2014).

To sum these considerations up: In classical Chinese, there was no need to introduce a delimiter of words since words and characters were almost congruent. In contemporary Chinese this is not the case. There is a considerable amount of syntactic words that are written with more than a single character. But because of linguistic features of the Chinese language which allow morphemes to occur relatively freely in different syntactical contexts and because of the relatively reduced word length variability in Chinese, it seems that the character is the central unit for reading Chinese.

Thus it seems that the graphematic word is simply not a relevant—or existing—unit in the CWS. This is an important insight for suprasegmental graphematics pertaining to the role of the graphematic hierarchy across languages. While the phonological counterpart of the graphematic hierarchy, the prosodic hierarchy, is assumed to be universal<fnref n="6" />, the writing system of Chinese demonstrates that at least the graphe-

<footnote n="6">6. But see, e.g., Schiering, Bickel, and Hildebrandt (2010), who question the universality of the phonological word and find evidence that there are more units within the prosodic hierarchy than assumed.</footnote>
matic word is not a universal category of the graphematic hierarchy. This opens the debate whether all units within the graphematic hierarchy are universal and whether the graphematic hierarchy as a whole is universal across writing systems at all.

## 6. Conclusion

The definition that the graphematic word is a string of graphemes bordered by spaces, which is well-accepted in the literature, turns out to be problematic because it does not take the role of punctuation marks into account. A promising alternative to this definition is typography-based. In this definition a graphematic word is defined as a sequence of slot-filler pairs, in which at least one filler is a grapheme, bordered by empty slots. This definition has the benefit that it allows to distinguish between the graphematic surface and the graphematic word proper. Clitics belong to the graphematic surface of a word only.

The graphematic word is part of the graphematic hierarchy, the graphematic counterpart to the phonological hierarchy. Taking the strict layer hypothesis into account, it is possible to explain certain features of the graphematic word. Since graphematic words consist of graphematic feet, which in turn consist of graphematic syllables, the graphematic word inherits traits of the foot and the syllable. One example for such a trait is the fact that graphematic words must have at least one vowel letter: because graphematic syllables need to have a vowel letter in their core, a graphematic word needs to have at least one vowel letter as well. Another example provided in this paper is the minimal weight restriction for graphematic words. The existence of this restriction can be explained by a well-formedness constraint of graphematic feet stating that a foot must be binary in syllabic or moraic terms.

Examining the German and English writing systems, it seems that the graphematic word mainly corresponds to the morphological and syntactical word in spoken language. A graphematic word written with no empty slots in between is interpreted as one morphological unit in both writing systems. Empty slots on the other hand indicate distinct syntactical units in the German writing system. In the English writing system, there is a greater variety in writing compound words. The use of a hyphen (a filler according to the typographic considerations in section 5) or the avoidance of empty slots may however disambiguate unclear cases.

In some writing systems there are no empty slots between characters. However, it can be argued that there are graphematic words in the Japanese writing system, which are not marked by empty slots but by graphotactical means. In the Japanese writing system, hiragana are used to represent function words and inflectional endings while other
scripts (especially kanji) are used to represent lexical information. Because lexical words usually start with a kanji character (or katakana or rōmaji), the beginning of a graphematic word can easily be spotted.

If we accept that graphematic words do exist in Japanese, which is a writing system without empty slots between words, the definition of graphematic words in (5) is not universal. A universal definition of graphematic words has to include that in some writing systems, graphotactical means are used to mark the borders of graphematic words.<fnref n="7" /> This universal definition must therefore be quite broad and unspecific. Subdefinitions pertaining to certain writing systems or families of writing systems are needed to supplement this broad universal definition. The definition in (15) is a first tentative proposal.

(15) A graphematic word is a sequence of slot-filler pairs, in which at least one filler must be a basic unit of the given writing system.

1. This sequence is bordered by empty slots or

2. the beginning of that sequence is indicated by other graphotactical means (e.g., the change of scripts).

The term basic unit is a deliberately broad term to accommodate different types of writing systems. However, it might not be quite clear what the basic unit of a given writing system is. In case of the JWS, it is fair to say that the characters of kanji, hiragana and katakana are basic units of the writing system. But it is unclear whether the characters of rōmaji are belonging to this class. Furthermore, while the notion of empty slots is quite clear, the term “graphotactical means” is quite fuzzy as well. In both cases, writing system specific subdefinitions must be supplemented.

Another insight we gained from examining writing systems without empty spaces pertains to the graphematic hierarchy. In the Chinese writing system, words are neither marked by empty slots nor by other graphotactical means. Thus it seems that the graphematic word is not a relevant unit in the Chinese writing system. This is an interesting finding for suprasegmental graphematics. In suprasegmental phonology, it is claimed that all the units of the prosodic hierarchy are universal. In graphematics, however, it seems that this is not the case—at least for the graphematic word. Further typological investigations are needed to explore the role of the graphematic hierarchy in non-alphabetical writing systems.

<footnote n="7">7. The Thai writing system may also be a candidate for a system marking its graphematic words by graphotactical means.</footnote>
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<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>
# Challenging the Dichotomy Between Phonography and Morphography: Transitions and Gray Areas

Sven Osterkamp · Gordian Schreiber

*Abstract.* Traditionally, glottographic writing is divided into the two fundamental categories of phonographic and (logo-, or increasingly) morphographic writing, each with further more fine-grained subdivisions where necessary. In recent decades, various revisions to the earlier either/or approach have been proposed, leading to more flexible typological models that, e.g., allow for a mixture of different types of phonography with different amounts of morphography in a given writing system. While it is thus common to acknowledge the mixed nature of writing systems as a whole, graphs or strings of graphs forming functional units (such as digraphs) are nevertheless typically assigned to either of the two basic typological categories. On closer scrutiny, however, there is an abundance of cases challenging this strict dichotomy on the level of graphs.

Having reviewed the different notions of logo- or morphography found in the literature, this paper revisits the fundamental distinction between phonography and morphography in writing systems, drawing upon cases from the following areas: First, we will address transitions from morphograms to phonograms as well as from phonograms to morphograms. The dividing line between morphograms and phonograms is, however, not always easy to draw, thus leading us to gray areas and indeterminable cases. Finally, we will have a closer look at semantically motivated phonograms, as even in phonography the level of semantics is not necessarily irrelevant altogether.

## 1. Preliminaries

In taxonomies of writing systems, so-called glottographic writing is commonly divided into phonography on the one hand and something else on the other that goes by several names, usually ‘logography’ (e.g.,

Sven Osterkamp

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>

0000-0002-4596-9283

Ruhr University Bochum, Faculty of East Asian Studies, Universitätsstr. 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany

E-mail: sven.osterkamp@rub.de

Gordian Schreiber

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>

0000-0002-7811-2518

Ruhr University Bochum, Faculty of East Asian Studies, Universitätsstr. 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany

E-mail: gordian.schreiber@rub.de

Y. Haralambous (Ed.), *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century 2020. Proceedings*

Grapholinguistics and Its Applications (ISSN: 2681-8566, e-ISSN: 2534-5192), Vol. 4. Fluxus Editions, Brest, 2021, pp. 47–82. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-graf-oste

ISBN: 978-2-9570549-6-1, e-ISBN: 978-2-9570549-8-5
Sampson, 1985, p. 32; Sampson, 2015, p. 24) or, increasingly, ‘morphography’ (Rogers, 2005, pp. 14–15; Joyce, 2011; Whittaker, 2011, p. 936 among others).<fnref n="1" /> Owing to the fact that the term morphography has been used in several different meanings, it is mandatory to first outline the understanding the present paper adheres to:

> A morphographic subsystem of a writing system is one in which the most fine-grained, systematically observed mapping possible is between one or more morphemes and one or more graphs (also referred to as morphograms).

> As Joyce (2011, 58–59, emphasis in original) observes, there is a “practic of some scholars of writing systems to continue using the term logographic while at the same time admitting that morphographic is *more precise*.” Indeed, logographic writing systems and logograms have repeatedly been described with an explicit reference to morphemes instead of words as the relevant linguistic units (e.g., Daniels and Bright, 1996, p. xlii), or also to either morphemes or words at the same time (e.g., Taylor and Taylor, 1983, pp. 20–21; Coulmas, 1996, p. 309). In other words, logography is not necessarily understood as implied by the term itself, with some scholars being fully aware of the discrepancy between the literal and intended meanings of the term.<fnref n="2" /> We concur with Joyce (2011) that whenever a writing system involves a mapping between graphs and morphemes (which may or may not be words at the same time), it should accordingly be labeled as morphographic. Logographic on the other hand should be reserved for systems involving a mapping between graphs and words (whether mono- or polymorphemic).<fnref n="3" /> In doing so, we follow, e.g.,

<footnote n="1">1. Hill (1967, p. 93) already distinguished between (‘discourse systems’), ‘morphemic systems’ and ‘phonemic systems,’ thus foreshadowing our current terminology. Different in terminology but similar in terms of the overall conceptualization is also French’s (1976, pp. 118, 126) dichotomy of ‘pleremic’ and ‘cenemic’ writing systems, which we will briefly return to further below.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Consider for instance Gnanadesikan (2009, p. 7): “Writing systems that concentrate on representing morphemes—as complete meaning-pronunciation complexes—are called *logographic* (the name, meaning ‘word-writing,’ is traditional, though it ignores the difference between morphemes and words).”</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Hill (1967, p. 93) already stated that “there are no systems based on words,” counting the Chinese writing system and others among what he termed “morphemic scripts” (ibid., p. 95). While typically opting for a somewhat less definite wording, more recent scholarship tends to subscribe to that view as well (e.g., Sampson, 1985, p. 39; Rogers, 2005, p. 14; Gnanadesikan, 2009, p. 7; Joyce, 2016, p. 294).</footnote>

<footnote>While ‘morphographic’ is without doubt the more appropriate choice for many cases traditionally labeled as ‘logographic,’ there may be good reasons to retain the latter term as well in its specific meaning. Consider for instance the case of Old Chinese as reconstructed in Baxter and Sagart (2014a,b). Here, Chinese characters typically correspond to entire words, which in turn can be mono- or polymorphemic, involving various affixes. See also already Chao (1968, pp. 102–103) for a similar position, referring however to Literary Chinese as an isolating language.</footnote>
Hill (1967, p. 96) and French (1976, p. 126) who contrast ‘morphemic’ and ‘logographic’ depending on the linguistic units represented.

Note that our understanding as outlined above explicitly refers to ‘one or more’ morphemes and graphs. The present paper thereby acknowledges one-to-one correspondences as *well as* deviations from this ideal. In previous scholarship on the question as to what linguistic units are represented by sinograms in particular (see DeFrancis, 1989 and Unger, 2011 for Chinese, or Matsunaga, 1996 for Japanese), it has repeatedly been argued that the label of ‘logography’ is inappropriate, as sinograms in the *modern* Chinese writing system frequently do not correspond to entire words, but merely to portions of words (which may or may not be morphemes in their own right). Sproat (2013) has convincingly argued that this reasoning is flawed, as we cannot necessarily expect consistent one-to-one correspondences between graphs and linguistic units in writing systems—be they phono- or morphographic in nature (see also Osterkamp & Schreiber, forthcoming). The classification of the modern Chinese writing system as largely morphographic rather than logographic is still valid, but for a different reason: When we consider what the most fine-grained units are that are involved in the mapping between graphs and linguistic units, we notice that suffixes and other bound morphemes that do not occur as words on their own are mapped onto graphs the same way as free morphemes are.<fnref n="4" /> Every word consists of one or more morphemes but not every morpheme constitutes a word. As sinograms writing a single bound morpheme cannot be satisfactorily explained via a mapping between graphs and words, a morphographic interpretation of the modern Chinese writing system is to be preferred. While numerous details differ, this by and large also applies to the case of sinograms in the Japanese writing system.

Apart from labeling ‘logography’ what is less misleadingly and thus better referred to as morphography, the labels ‘logography’ and ‘morphography’ are sometimes also applied to what is more appropriately described as semantography, or ideography, i.e., a direct mapping between graphs and meanings (rather than linguistic units carrying meaning). This may result, at least in part, from an understanding of words or morphemes chiefly as units of meaning, thereby losing sight of their phonological form. In the present paper, morphography is by definition taken to relate to morphemes, which in turn are understood as linguistic units—i.e., single phonemes or strings of phonemes—carrying meaning. A phonological form is therefore part and parcel of a morpheme, so that

<footnote n="4">4. In DeFrancis' (1984, pp. 184–187) count, about 44% of the sinograms in the modern Chinese writing system are mapped onto free morphemes (or lexemes) and 45% are mapped onto bound morphemes, while the remaining 11% of the graphs form one part of the spellings of polysyllabic free morphemes (as in shānhú 珊瑚 'coral').</footnote>
both morphography and phonography relate to the level of phonology, even if indirectly in case of the former.

While the above might seem obvious, this understanding neverthe-
less stands in stark contrast to how ‘logography’ or ‘morphography,’ as
well as ‘logograms’ and ‘morphograms,’ have often been understood in
previous scholarship—namely as relating to phonology only optionally
or not at all. For instance, Daniels and Bright (1996, p. xlii) define a
‘logogram’ as “a character that denotes the meaning but not the pro-
nunciation of a morpheme,” whereas Taylor and Taylor (1983, 20–21,
emphasis in original removed) state that a “writing system in which
one grapheme represents primarily the meaning (and sometimes sec-
ondarily the sound) of one word or morpheme may be called a logogra-
phy.” ‘Logography’ has also been “defined as the graphical encoding of
nonphonological linguistic information” by Sproat (2000, p. 143), who
“view[s] any component of a writing system as having a logographic
function if it formally encodes a portion of non-phonological linguis-
tic structure, whether it be a whole morpheme, or merely some seman-
tic portion of that morpheme” (ibid., p. 131). If a morpheme is taken
to have both a phonological form and a meaning, it is also difficult to
see the necessity of “suggest[ing] ‘morphophonic’ or ‘morphonic’” as an
inclusive term for all three kinds of writing systems of a “meaning-plus-
sound” type DeFrancis (1989, p. 58) posits “as drawing attention to the
dual aspect of the systems, namely the primary phonetic aspect plus
the secondary but nonetheless important nonphonetic, that is semantic
or morphemic aspect.” The dual aspect of such system can sufficiently
be captured by terms like ‘morphographic’ or ‘morphemic’—and it goes
without saying that if understood as in this paper, both phonographic
and morphographic writing systems relate to phonology.

In the preceding paragraphs our focus was solely on morphography in
a narrow sense, involving the mapping of graphs onto entire morphemes.
In fact, the same label of ‘morphography’ (or ‘logography’) is also applied
to typologically speaking entirely different cases pertaining to what are
essentially phonographic writing systems, which however may be char-
acterized as requiring morpheme-specific knowledge to get from pronun-
ciation to spelling and vice-versa (be it from the reader’s perspective, the
writer’s perspective, or both).<fnref n="5" /> It is in this sense that the modern English
writing system is sometimes called “partly logographic” (Sampson, 1985,
p. 203; Sproat, 2016, p. 37), “pseudologographic” (Sproat, 2000, p. 82),
or is described “as having moved some way away from the phonographic
towards the logographic principle” (Sampson, 2015, p. 259) and thus “as
being partly phonographic and partly logographic” (Sproat, 2016, p. 33).

<footnote n="5">5. A basic distinction between mapping rules from the writer's perspective as op-
posed to mapping rules from the reader's perspective has already been drawn in Haas
(1983, pp. 18-19).</footnote>
In a similar vein, Unger (2004, p. 29) states that “English spellings are full of logographic hints,” and Gnanadesikan (2017, p. 15) acknowledges a “logographic component” in English orthography.

While these two different notions of morphography relate to funda-
mentally different phenomena, they have often been conflated in pre-
vious studies on the typology of writing systems. For instance, Rogers’
(2005) typological matrix indicates the ‘type of phonography’ (abjad,
alphabetic, etc.) on its x-axis, and the ‘amount of morphography’ on its
y-axis. Moreover, writing systems are classified as being either deep or
shallow in terms of orthographic depth (understood here in the sense of
morphological constancy in spellings).<fnref n="6" /> Leaving aside the problems in-
volved in measuring the ‘amount of morphography,’<fnref n="7" /> we may note that
morphography is understood here in *both* senses at the same time: In
English (classified here as an orthographically deep system exhibiting
a medium amount of morphography), for instance, “the use of numer-
als such as <7 8 9> adds to the amount of morphography, as does the
fact that the spelling distinguishes homophonous morphemes such as
*by, bye, buy*” (Rogers, 2005, p. 275). Only the numerals represent mor-
phograms proper, i.e., on the level of mapping, and in fact it is only cases
along these lines that are mentioned (ibid., p. 15) when the term mor-
phographic is first introduced in the book to describe “a writing system
where the primary relationship of graphemes is to morphemes” (ibid.,

For instance, in both taxonomies, the Japanese writing system is considered to feature a greater amount of logography or morphography than the Chinese writing system. But what exactly is being measured here, and how? Are *hiragana* and *katakana* syllabograms excluded from the count? And if not, how is the type-token distinction taken into account? Even if the total number of morphograms in use within the Japanese writing system is considerably higher in terms of types than the number of *kana*, the token distribution for sinograms as opposed to *kana* is often in the vicinity of 1:2 in an average modern Japanese text. As long as no objective criteria on how to measure the amount of logography or morphography have been established, the critical stance adopted by Fukumori and Ikeda (2002, pp. 42–43) to the effect that such taxonomies should be avoided seems well justified. See Joyce (2016, p. 296) for similar criticism.

<footnote n="6">6. In Rogers' (2005, p. 275) model, “[o]rthographic depth is greater if different allomorphs of the same morpheme are written the same [...], e.g., *south-southern, child-children, sign-signal.*” Note, however, that it is merely represented as a binary parame- ter (i.e., either deep or shallow), instead of another continuum parallel to the ‘amount of morphography’—possibly in order to avoid having to add a z-axis to an already complex taxonomy.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. The problem of quantification is carried over into Rogers' matrix from its precursor as originally proposed by Sproat (2000, p. 142), which measures the 'amount of logography' on its y-axis. Yet, as Sproat (ibid., p. 142) himself readily admits, 'the degree of logography is tricky to estimate [...] and the arrangement of particular writing systems in this second dimension is largely impressionistic.' (Note also that Sproat's understanding of 'logography' as quoted earlier is radically different from Rogers' notion of morphography.)</footnote>
p. 14; also cf. the definitions on p. 295). Morphography is thus primarily conceptualized as a mapping phenomenon (as also in this paper), but not consistently so by also referring to morpheme-specific but nevertheless phonographic spellings for homophones such as *by*, *bye*, and *buy*.

Envisioning a rather different taxonomy, Unger (2004, pp. 30–33) posits a continuum on a single axis with the extremes of ‘pure phonography’ and ‘pure logography.’ Writing systems are then assigned a position on this continuum, ranging from Finnish and Spanish closer to the phonographic end, to Chinese and Japanese closer to the logographic end. English ranges in the middle here: It is classified as being less phonographic and more logographic than Finnish, but more phonographic and less logographic than Chinese or Japanese. Again, one might receive the impression that the two different notions of morphography (logography in Unger’s terms) are not distinguished here, the difference between the two being reduced to a matter of degree. In fact, however, Unger’s understanding of logography is quite unlike Rogers’ notion of morphography, as the former remarks: “All writing systems incorporate techniques that are logographic—that is, make use of linguistic structures beyond the merely phonological” (ibid., pp. 28–29).

The question to be asked at this point is: What exactly, then, is the common denominator of the two notions of morphography (or logography) as found in the literature, as it were morphography as observed in the Chinese and English writing systems respectively? It is, evidently, their common reliance on morpheme-specific knowledge, as already briefly mentioned above. In both cases, knowing a morpheme’s pronunciation and a number of general sound mapping rules is not sufficient to write it in its conventional way, be it by means of a morphogram (e.g., in Chinese 鹿 for lù ‘deer,’ but 路 for lù ‘road’) or by means of phonograms, the exact choice of which is determined by the morpheme in question (e.g., <deer> for /dɪə/ ‘hoofed ruminant mammal,’ but <dear> for /dɪə/ ‘precious’). Or from the reader’s perspective: The knowledge of morphograms as morpheme-specific graphs is necessary in reading (cf. the two different Chinese words pronounced lù above), as is, in the case of phonograms, the knowledge of morpheme-specific sound values of certain graphs or strings of graphs (e.g., <ea> in <bread> and <break> read as /ɛ/ and /eɪ/ respectively), or also the knowledge of unwritten or underspecified sounds to be supplied in reading (e.g., Arabic <fndq> فندق for /fnduq/ ‘hotel’). The driving factors behind the increase in morpheme-specific knowledge required can thus be described as heterography from the perspective of the writer, and as homography (whether related to morphological constancy or not) as well as underspelling from the perspective of the reader.<fnref n="8" /> All this must not, however,

<footnote n="8">8. The notion of underspelling refers to the phenomenon of linguistic elements that are left out in writing but are expected to be added by the reader to correctly</footnote>
obscure the fact that the actual mappings involved in these two kinds
are quite distinct, being morphographic on the one side and in the end
still phonographic on the other.

We are thus dealing with three basic types here: morphographic maps
pings (which by definition require morpheme-specific knowledge) as
well as phonographic mappings, which may either require morpheme-
specific knowledge of the kinds outlined above or not. Put differently,
English ‘morphography’ and Chinese ‘morphography,’ for instance, do
not differ in quantitative terms alone—first and foremost we are dealing
here with a qualitative difference. It is not only crucial for the issues to
be discussed in the following sections of this paper, but also desirable for
future research in the field of grapholinguistics in general to take these
distinctions into due account for greater clarity.

Such a tripartite distinction in fact turns out to agree well with the
approach already pursued by French (1976, p. 126). French broadly
distinguishes between ‘pleremic’ and ‘cenemic’ systems, corresponding
to what we refer to as morphography (with systems involving mor-
phographic mappings) and phonography (involving phonographic map-
pings); the ‘cenemic’ systems are further subdivided into a ‘complex
cenemic’ (or ‘alternational’) as well as a ‘simple cenemic’ (or ‘non-
alternational’) type. Taking the terms for systems of minimal grain-
sizes as examples, he distinguishes between ‘morphemic’ (= pleremic),
‘morphophonemic’ (= complex cenemic) and ‘phonemic’ (= simple cene-
mic) writing systems. According to French (ibid., p. 124), ‘morpho-
phonemic’ systems differ from ‘phonemic’ systems merely in that “they
represent a morpheme in just one way,” so that it remains unclear as
to how other kinds of phonographic mappings involving morpheme-
specific knowledge are accounted for in French’s taxonomy.

Taking our own considerations above and the tripartite distinction
made by French (ibid.) as a starting point, we may thus arrive at an
understanding of glottography and its basic subtypes as summarized in

retrieve the encoded utterance. The term has been applied to various writing systems, such as Mayan, Sumerian, Egyptian, or Linear B (Zender, 1999, pp. 131–135). By not representing all vowels in writing, abjads can be viewed as featuring underspelling in a systematic fashion.

The terms heterography and homography are adopted from Rogers (2005, pp. 16–17). Heterography refers to a situation, in which two or more graphs are mapped onto one or more linguistic units in different contexts, e.g., both <f> and <ph> to the same phoneme /f/ in English, depending on the morpheme in question. In cases of homography, on the other hand, one graph or one string of graphs is mapped onto two or more linguistic units in different contexts, such as the digraph <th> representing either /ð/ or /θ/, again depending on the morpheme in question.

Orthographic depth as understood by Rogers (ibid., p. 275), i.e., as morphological constancy in spellings alone, constitutes a subset of homography. In competing understandings, orthographic depth may however also refer “to the reliability of print-to-speech correspondences” (Schmalz et al., 2015, p. 1614) in more general terms.
Figure 1. For the sake of simplicity, the further subdivisions to be made for phonographic mappings are left out of consideration here. To name but a few examples, morphonography is not limited to alphabets as in English, French or also Korean, it is similarly observed among others in abjads such as in Arabic or in abugidas as in Tibetan.

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Basic subtypes of glottography and the respective functions of graphs</figcaption></figure>

The different types of mapping as well as functions of graphs posited here are in the first place intended as categories for specific instances, i.e., to describe how a given graph or a string of graphs relates to the linguistic units (phonemes or morphemes) encoded. They are likewise applicable to subsystems of writing system, e.g., when speaking of the morphographic subsystem of Arabic numerals in English or the phonographic subsystem of *katakana* in Japanese. However, broadening the scope even further and using these terms as typological labels to classify writing systems as a whole is not advisable, as writing systems are generally “taxonomically ‘messy’” and “mixtures of some sort or other” (Rogers, 2005, p. 272). It is questionable whether typologically pure writing systems (i.e., systems not comprising any typologically distinct subsystems) exist at all, particularly in the case of morphography (cf. Coulmas, 1996, p. 521; Daniels in Daniels and Bright, 1996, p. 4).<fnref n="9" /> Therefore, it seems problematic to apply ‘morphography’ as a broad label to refer to an overall writing system, despite the fact that it reflects the typology of a single subsystem only.

<footnote n="9">9. As writing systems coming comparatively close to pure morphography one might consider the cases of Literary Chinese, Tangut, or of a number of morphographic modes of inscription employed throughout the history of writing in Japan, commonly (and misleadingly so) referred to as *bentai kanbun* 变体漢文 (lit. 'variant Chinese'; cf. Schreiber, forthcoming for details). However, even in these writing systems there are graphs used phonographically to transcribe, e.g., loanwords, in part even exclusively.</footnote>
With these preliminaries in mind, we will in the remainder of this paper revisit the fundamental distinction between phonography and morphography in writing systems, drawing upon cases from four areas: First, we will address transitions from morphograms to phonograms as well as from phonograms to morphograms (sections 2 and 3 respectively). The dividing line between morphograms and phonograms is, however, not always easy to draw, thus leading us to gray areas and indeterminable cases (section 4). Finally, we will have a closer look at semantically motivated phonograms (section 5), as even in phonography the level of semantics is not necessarily irrelevant altogether.

## 2. Transitions From Morphograms to Phonograms

Transitions from morphograms to phonograms are crucial for the development of full-fledged writing systems whenever a strong morphographic component is present from the outset. They likewise occur on a regular basis during the process of adapting an existing writing system to another language. This type of transition is commonly referred to under the label of ‘rebus principle’ and has received widespread scholarly attention as “the cardinal strategy for increasing the expressive power of logographic systems” (Coulmas, 1996, p. 433). In a similar vein, DeFrancis (1984, p. 139) vividly elaborates that “[t]he rebus idea seems obvious to us since we use it in children’s games, but it actually constitutes a stupendous invention, an act of intellectual creation of the highest order—a quantum leap forward beyond the stage of vague and imprecise pictures to a higher stage that leads into the ability to represent all the subtleties and precision expressible in spoken language.”

In the early history of the Chinese writing system, but also during its later course of development, graphs already established as morphograms were commonly extended to phonographically write (near-) homophones of the morphemes in question. An example from the early stages of the Chinese writing system, i.e., prior to its standardization starting in the 3rd century BCE (Galambos, 2006, p. 3), is the case of the graph 其 as outlined in Figure 2.

In its earliest etymographical stage, the graph 其 was a pictographic representation of a winnowing basket, and it was accordingly employed as a morphogram to write Old Chinese *k(r)ə ‘winnowing basket’ (1).<fnref n="10" /> From early on, the graph could also be desemanticized (Boltz, 1994, p. 21; Handel, 2019, pp. 38–39) and used as a phonogram (highlighted in gray in Figure 2) to spell (near-)homophones of *k(r)ə in a rebus

<footnote n="10">10. Here and elsewhere Old Chinese reconstructions are quoted from Baxter and Sagart (2014a,b). Round brackets enclose elements that may or may not have been present and are accordingly often omitted in simplified notations.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2. Example for a transition from morphogram to phonogram</figcaption></figure>

fashion. These (near-)homophones included the high frequency function word *gə ‘3rd person possessive pronoun’—which much like various other function words did not lend itself to a pictographic representation. It is now a matter of interpretation whether the use of *kə for such (near-)homophones of *k(r)ə should be considered to cancel the original morphographic value of the graph. In the second stage shown in Figure 2 we are thus either dealing with a polyvalent graph having both the original morphographic value of *k(r)ə ‘winnowing basket’ and an additional phonographic value of /K(r)ə(s)/ (2a),<fnref n="11" /> or the graph is treated as a simple phonogram for /K(r)ə(s)/ in all contexts (2b). While the latter possibility (2b) is certainly worth considering as a theoretical option, the former interpretation (2a) appears to be more widely accepted. Regardless of this question, in both analyses we can observe the creation of a phonogram on the basis of a pre-existing morphogram.

Transitions from morphograms to phonograms are also widely attested in later stages of the Chinese writing system, and in fact up to present day. Throughout history, the demand for phonograms was naturally most pressing whenever the need arose to transcribe foreign names and loanwords. One of the major earlier donor languages was Sanskrit (e.g., *nièpán* 涅槃 ‘nirvana’ < *nirvāṇa*), while in more recent times English has occupied a central position (e.g., *bāshī* 巴士 ‘bus’). All of these spellings can be considered as being phonographic in nature, at least originally. Apart from loans, phonograms also played an important role whenever new elements emerged in the spoken language due to language-internal change and scribes felt the need to unambiguously record these new forms in writing. Contracted forms in Old Chinese are cases in point: When the conservative disyllabic *[g]∫aj pə 何不 ‘why not?’

<footnote n="11">11. /K-/ here represents the class of velar stop initials in Old Chinese, i.e., /k-/, /kʰ-/ and /g-/.</footnote>
was shortened to a single syllable in speech, it came to be written by
the graph 盡—originally a morphogram for *m-[k]fap 'to cover,' but here
undergoing desemanticization to act as a phonogram. As the traditional
morphographic spelling with two graphs would have been decoded by
readers as the linguistically conservative form, the change in pronun-
ciation could only be highlighted by devising a distinct phonographic
rendering. Such transitions typically involve the *ad hoc* desemanticiza-
tion of morphograms that were not in productive use as phonograms in
other contexts. Therefore, even if the resulting spellings can only be
explained via a transition from morphogram to phonogram, they might
eventually be reanalyzed as being morphographic in nature (also cf. sec-
tion 3).

While there is not necessarily a clearly delimited set of graphs exclu-
sively employed as phonograms in the modern Chinese writing system,
there are nonetheless a number of graphs that appear particularly of-
ten in phonographic use. For this reason, analyzing 巴士 for bāshì 'bus'
as a string of two phonograms and not reanalyzing them en bloc as a di-
graphic morphogram may be a valid approach as both 巴 and 士 are fre-
quently used in phonographic spellings for the syllables bā and shì re-
spectively (Kashima, 1993, p. 18). The dividing line between the two
analyses as a digraphic morphogram and as two phonograms is not nec-
essarily clear-cut, however, thus hinting at the difficulties involved in
classifying graphs in an either/or approach (see section 4 for more on
this issue).

Transitions from morphograms into phonograms do not only oc-
cur sporadically on an *ad hoc* basis, but often also on a larger scale
and more or less systematically, leading to the creation of entire sets
of phonograms. A well-known example is the emergence of the Old
Japanese inventory of phonographically employed sinograms known as
*man'yōgana* 万葉仮名, the precursor to the later *hiragana* and *katakana*. Sim-
ilar developments involving large-scale transitions from morphograms
to phonograms can also be seen in a number of other writing systems
such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan (Mora-Marín, 2003) and a num-
ber of cuneiform-based systems (Boltz, 1994, pp. 12–13; Coulmas, 2003,
pp. 173–174, 176–178; Handel, 2019, p. 46 among many others).

3. Transitions From Phonograms to Morphograms

In principle, morphograms can at any given time be desemanticized and
employed as mere phonograms due to their inherent phonological value
deriving from the morphemes they are associated with. Transitions of
this type may appear as being more natural than the reverse, but tran-
sitions of phonograms to morphograms are likewise well attested—even
if the conditions appear to be much more heterogeneous (Matsumoto, 2017, p. 102).

As we have already observed in Figure 2, an expanded version of which is given below as Figure 3, the graph 其 originally writing *k(r)ə 'winnowing basket' (1) was first borrowed to write (near-)homo-phones, notably including the high-frequency function word *gə '3rd person possessive pronoun' (2a/b). This latter usage was eventually conventionalized—i.e., the graph came to be firmly associated with that specific morpheme (cf. the notion of resemanticization in Handel, 2019, pp. 38–39)—so that the graph was reanalyzed as a morphogram (3). This conventionalization is precisely what marks the transition from phono-gram to morphogram. It is worth noting that the low-frequency word the graph 其 had originally been devised for, i.e., *k(r)ə 'winnowing basket,' has given way to *gə '3rd person possessive pronoun' and came to be written by the separate character 竹, created by combining the original 其 with the taxogram 竹 'bamboo.'

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. Example of a transition from morphogram to phonogram and back</figcaption></figure>

For another example we may turn to the modern Japanese writing system. Before the orthography reform of 1946, the *hiragana* を was in common use as a phonogram for /o/ (originally /wo/, but the phonemic distinction between the two had long been lost). However, as part of the reform, it was decided to restrict the use of this graph to write /o/ only in the case of accusative =o (and replacing it with お in any other instance of /o/). By this deliberate decision, the original phonogram を was essentially turned into a morphogram, as has repeatedly been
noted in the literature (see, e.g., Kōno, 1977, p. 19; Tranter, 2013, p. 21; Matsumoto, 2017, p. 103; Handel, 2019, 208, n. 54).

A yet different type of semanticization of phonograms can be observed in the Classic Mayan writing system (Matsumoto, 2017). Here, we find originally mixed spellings of morphograms accompanied by phonograms acting as phonetic complements to be reanalyzed *en bloc* as morphograms. These morphograms are in turn supplied with additional phonetic complements with the same sound value as the original phonograms, which are interpreted as having undergone 'orthographic semantization.' Whereas this type of reanalyzed mixed spelling occurs system-internally in Classic Mayan, the same phenomenon can be observed across writing systems in the adaptation of mixed Akkadian and Sumerian spellings in Hittite cuneiform, in which complexes of morphograms together with phonetic complements are likewise borrowed and reanalyzed *en bloc* as a single polygraphic morphogram (ibid., p. 103).

One of the most intriguing cases of transitions to morphograms is that of so-called Aramaic heterograms in Middle Iranian languages.<fnref n="12" /> In Sogdian, for instance, the word *yrîw* ‘neck, body’ could be written either phonographically or morphographically:<fnref n="13" /> In the former case, the Sogdian pronunciation of the word in question is spelled out in the Aramaic-based Sogdian script, namely as <yr’yw> (cf. Figure 4; see the first word in line 6).<fnref n="14" /> In the latter case of a morphographic notation, however, the word is written in the same script, but in a way that does not reflect its pronunciation in Sogdian at all. Instead, the ‘heterogram’ <CWRH> (see lines 2 and 3, near the end and beginning respectively) is based on the pronunciation of the word’s translation equivalent in Aramaic, i.e., *swr-b* ‘his neck.’ A hypothetical example for the sake of an analogy would be to borrow the spelling <corpus>—that is, originally a phonographic spelling of the Latin word *corpus* ‘body’—and write this string of letters

<footnote n="12">12. The term ‘heterogram’ has a long history in the field of Middle Iranian studies (see already Junker, 1911, who posits the terminological pair of ‘heterogram’ versus ‘eteogram’), but it has subsequently also been applied to comparable phenomena in other writing systems, including cuneiform-based systems such as Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian (Kudrinski and Yakubovich, 2016; Kudrinski, 2017). The use of sinograms to (also) write native morphemes in the Japanese writing system has similarly repeatedly been likened to the use of heterograms in Middle Iranian languages (e.g., Kōno, 1977, p. 20; Sproat, 2000, pp. 187–188, Sproat, 2016, p. 32; Lurie, 2011, p. 360, Lurie, 2012, p. 181). Note also the treatment of Japanese, Akkadian and Middle Iranian together in a chapter on “Words and Heterograms” in Daniels (2018, pp. 99–108).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. The example is given here based on Yoshida (2001, p. 551), Yoshida (2016, section “Scripts, orthography, and basic phonology”) and Yoshida (2013, pp. 158–163), the latter of which also provides an edition and translation into English of Pelliot sogdien 20.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14. Note that aleph <>'> preceding yodh <y> serves as a long vowel marker, making the spelling a straightforward phonographic representation of *yrîw*.</footnote>
in order to represent the English word *body* in an English-language text. One might also extend the analogy to include Latin-based abbreviations in English, such as <e.g.] (on which see further below; also cf. Rogers, 2005, p. 124).

<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 4. Specimen of a Sogdian text featuring heterograms<fnref n="15" /></figcaption></figure>

In terms of typology, we are clearly dealing with a morphogram in Sogdian, as no reasonable phonographic mapping of <CWRH> onto *yriw* is possible. Apart from isolated chance correspondences, Sogdian sounds and the constituent graphs of Aramaic-based heterograms simply do not match. In Aramaic on the other hand, the spellings underlying such heterograms allow for a phonographic mapping. We may note, however, that owing to the nature of the Aramaic writing system as an abjad, these spellings go beyond plain phonography: Spellings alone are not necessarily sufficient to arrive at the pronunciation of a given morpheme. Instead the reader requires morpheme-specific knowledge about the conventional correspondence of written and spoken forms. The spellings in Aramaic are thus already morphonographic in nature.<fnref n="16" />

The essentially non-phonographic nature of heterograms is under-
lined by the observation that the Aramaic spellings may contain certain
anomalies, for instance letters in inverted order, the reduplication of let-
ters, or the interchange of look-alike letters (see Shaked, 1993, pp. 76-
77 for examples from Middle Persian). As morphonographic spellings in

<footnote n="15">15. Bibliothèque nationale de France, call no. Pelliot sogdien 20, lines 1–6. View-
able online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8305804s.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16. Of interest in this context is the positioning of abjads on the continuum from ‘pure phonography’ to ‘pure logography’ as outlined by Unger (2004, p. 30): “Arabic and Hebrew, which usually omit vowel signs, have fewer such irregularities but require you to fill in a lot of phonological information on the basis of your knowledge of the structure of the language; hence, they are even less phonographic [than English and French].”</footnote>
Aramaic, the exact identity of each letter may have been eminently im-
portant, but not so anymore after the string of graphs has been borrowed
into the writing system of a different language, in which it is treated en
bloc as a morphogram and corresponds to the translation equivalent of
the underlying Aramaic expression.

Against this backdrop of heterograms in Middle Iranian languages, it is worthwhile to reconsider the abundance of abbreviations in (mor)phonographic and specifically alphabetic writing systems—which at least when borrowed into other languages again yield clear-cut morphograms. When abbreviations are formed within a writing system, on the other hand, traces of a phonographic mapping are still evident to varying degrees. Yet, owing to the fact that morpheme-specific knowledge is indispensable to get from spelling to pronunciation, the resulting spellings are morphonographic (if not already morphographic) in nature.

The typological status of abbreviations is not easy to determine, as they do not only involve incomplete (mor)phonographic mappings, but also feature non-(mor)phonographic elements. For instance, the letter <r> in the abbreviation <Mrs.] makes perfect sense in a diachronic perspective, as *missus* derives from *mistress*. Synchronically, however, it does not correspond to the phoneme /r/ anymore, which has fallen victim to consonant cluster simplification over the course of time. One might resort to calling <r> a silent or mute letter in this case, but the situation would be the same: Unlike <M> and 
, <r> alone is not mapped onto any linguistic unit anymore. Original digraphs are likewise often retained only partially in abbreviations, thereby yielding otherwise untested correspondences under a strictly phonographical interpretation. Consider, for instance, <bldg.] for *building*, in which the first half of the digraph <ng> /ŋ/ is lost, or even <smtg> for *something*, which in addition to the first half of <ng> /ŋ/ also omits the second half of the digraph <th> /θ/. Under normal circumstances, i.e., from the perspective of standard orthography, *<g> for /ŋ/ is just as invalid a correspondence as *<t> for /θ/ is.

Abbreviations may also involve elements that do not even relate to a
phonographic mapping in historical terms. Examples such as <Mrs.] or
<bldg.] contain a period <.] as a clearly non-phonographic element at
the end. In contractions such as <int'l> for *international* or <cont'd> for
*continued* an apostrophe <>' serves a similar non-phonographic function.
Especially in pre-modern usage, a number of other abbreviation marks
were used as well, including for instance overbars and tildes (for the lat-
ter see, e.g., the abbreviation for *deus* treated further below). Another
phenomenon that has a long history but is also still observed today is
the systematically employed iconic doubling of the final letter of pre-
existing abbreviations to represent plurals, as in <exx.] for *examples* or
<pp.] for *pages*. The same means is also employed for superlatives, as
in <ff> for *fortissimo* or <pp> for *pianissimo*. It goes without saying that the second instance of the doubled letters does not correspond to any phoneme at any point in time. At best, the repeated letter may be taken to function as a morphogram for a plural or superlative suffix. If we follow the lead of Gelb (1963, p. 16), we might even count as morphograms such abbreviations as <m> for *meter*, *mile* or *minute*—i.e., abbreviations that could also still be interpreted as incomplete (mor)phonographic mappings.<fnref n="17" />

Entirely clear-cut, on the other hand, is the typological status of ab-
breviations when borrowed from one writing system to another and
eventually read out as the translation equivalent in the recipient lan-
guage. Cases such as the Latin-based <e.g.> (*exempli gratia* ‘for the sake
of an example’) or <i.e.> (*id est* ‘that is’) corresponding to *for instance* and
*that is* in English have to be treated as morphograms similar to the afore-
mentioned heterograms in Middle Iranian languages. Neither case in-
volves a phonographic mapping between the spelling as found in the
donor language, and the phonological form of the corresponding item
in the recipient language.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 5. Roman-based abbreviations in the main text of *Guia do pecador*<fnref n="18" /></figcaption></figure>

The treatment of abbreviations borrowed from other languages as
morphograms is even more apparent in cases involving writing sys-

<footnote n="17">17. Or in Gelb's (1963, p. 16) own terminology: "Alphabetic signs" that "function as words." His list of examples further includes cases containing periods <.> as well as Latin-based abbreviations such as <e.g.>, which will be treated next.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18. *Guia do pecador* (1599), copy in the possession of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, call no. Japonais 312, vol. 2, f. 12r. Viewable online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10508361v/f37.</footnote>
tems based on different scripts. Figure 5 shows a passage from the *Guia do pecador* (1599), an adaptation in Japanese of Luis de Granada’s (1504–1588) *Guia de pecadores*, as printed at the Jesuit Mission Press in Japan. Here as well as in several other contemporary Jesuit sources from Japan,<fnref n="19" /> the four Latin-based (and, as far as the use of <x> for *Christ* is concerned, in turn partly Greek-based) abbreviations <dī> (for Japanese *deusu* < Latin *deus*), <Jš> (*Jezusu* < Portuguese *Jesus*), <Jx> (*Jezu Kirishito* < *Jesu C(b)risto*) and <x> (*Kirishito* < C(b)risto) are frequently met with (see Figure 6). Such abbreviations are clearly treated as one graphic as well as functional unit each, on par with the morphographically employed Chinese characters.

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 6. Roman-based abbreviations in *Guia do pecador*<fnref n="20" /></figcaption></figure>

## 4. Gray Areas and Indeterminable Cases

While it is common nowadays to address overall writing systems as being typologically mixed—or put differently, as featuring both a phonographic and a morphographic subsystem—it seems often to be taken for granted that specific graphs or strings of graphs can clearly and unmistakably be assigned either to the class of phonograms or to the class of morphograms. In fact, however, there are gray areas in which the typological status of a given graph (that is, its use phonographic or morphographic in a specific context?) is disputable, if not entirely indeterminable.

The existence of such gray areas may be largely irrelevant for the trained reader, but it often clashes with the approach of modern transcriptions of pre-modern Japanese texts for instance, which usually imply

<footnote n="19">19. Some or all of these four abbreviations are also featured in other later prints produced by the Mission Press, namely *Doctrina Christam* (1600), *Doctrinæ Christianæ rudimenta* (1600), *Contemptus mundi* (1610) and *Fidesno quiō* (1611). Even before their first appearance in print they had already been used in manuscripts (see Popescu, 2004 for examples).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20. *Guia do pecador* (1599), copy in the possession of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, call no. Japonais 312, appendix to vol. 2, f. 9v. Viewable online at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10508361v/f178.</footnote>
clear-cut two-way or even more fine-grained distinctions: either in *kana* vs. Chinese characters as phono- and morphograms respectively, at least by and large, or also in Romanizations, using for instance lower case for phonograms, and **UPPER CASE** or **SMALL CAPS** for morphograms.

In today's usage, there is a clear-cut visual distinction corresponding with a functional distinction most of the time. Therefore, even with an untrained eye it is easy to distinguish between み as a *kana* writing the syllable /mi/ as a phonogram, and 見 as a Chinese character writing the stem of the verb *mi.ru* 見る 'to see' as well as the beginning portion of the stems of its derivatives *mise.ru* 見せる 'to show' and *mie.ru* 見える 'to be visible, to look like' as a morphogram. In pre-modern times, however, the syllable /mi/ was alternatively written with a number of different phonograms (retrospectively known as *hentaigana* 変体仮名 'variant *kana*') including 々, which etymographically speaking is simply a cursivized form of the above-mentioned character 見. Thus, when we look at cur- sively written texts—which was common both in manuscripts and prints up until the late 19th century—, there is at times no visual distinction between phono- and morphograms.

Consider the following set of examples taken from a 17th century print, more specifically a cookbook bearing the title *Ryōri monogatari* 料理 物語 (1647). Cursive 々 appears a number of times throughout the text, including clear-cut cases in which it serves as a phonogram and others in which its exact function is less obvious or even indeterminable.

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 7. Several instances of 々 in a 1647 print<fnref n="21" /></figcaption></figure>

In the left-most example in Figure 7 the graph in question writes the first syllable of the word *mikan* 'mikan (citrus fruit).' The form *mikan* is a slightly reduced variant of earlier *mikkan* 蜜柑, unmistakably a Sino-Japanese loanword having nothing to do with the above-mentioned na-

<footnote n="21">21. *Ryōri monogatari* 料理物語 (1647), copy in the possession of Kyoto University, Main Library, Tanimura Collection 谷村文庫, call no. 9-69/リ/1. Viewable online at: https://rmda.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/item/rb00012373</footnote>
tive verbs for ‘to see,’ ‘to show,’ or ‘to be visible’—or with ‘seeing’ in gen-
eral for that matter. This is thus an unambiguous instance of ㄋ as a
phonogram and accordingly it would typically be transcribed by the cor-
responding modern standard kana, i.e., み /mi/, to yield みかん for mikaN.
The example on the right is quite different, as it involves the attributive
form miy.uru of the verb miy.u ‘(here:) to look like,’ the precursor of modern
mie.ru referred to above. In this case, ㄋ can therefore be conceived of in
two ways: again as a mere phonogram for /mi/, but also as a morphogram
for the verb in question. In a modern transcription the result would likely
be 見ゆる, opting for the latter interpretation, but purely phonographic み
ゆる cannot be ruled out either. The example in the middle may be taken to
lie somewhere in between the other two cases: While *sui-mi-sooroo.te* ‘take a
sip and see (what the taste is like), try taking a sip’ does involve the verb
mi.ru as its second element, it is not used here in its visual sense of ‘to see.’
Instead, *mi.ru* as used in verbal compounds of the structure V+*mi.ru* ‘try do-
ing V’ (corresponding to modern V+*Te mi.ru*) is commonly interpreted as
an auxiliary verb. Even if the underlying full verbs are written sinograph-
ically on a regular basis, auxiliaries as their derivatives are typically writ-
ten in *kana* in modern standard orthography. The involvement of the verb
*mi.ru* may therefore suggest a transcription as すひ見候て in parallel to 見ゆ
る, but a modern transcriber influenced by current orthographical prac-
tices might lean towards a phonographic interpretation of ㄋ, yielding す
ひみ候て instead. In a modern transcription you are forced to make a de-
cision in an either/or fashion, but the functional distinction is not neces-
sarily as clear-cut in the original as such a transcription may suggest.

Similar difficulties are also common in Old Japanese, as one and the
same graph was often used either as a phonogram or as a morphogram
on different occasions, typically without any visual distinction.<fnref n="22" /> In
modern editions and other scholarship on the relevant texts, Roman-
izations of Old Japanese often not only reflect a specific understanding
of the language's phonology and, depending on the case, also provide
a morphological analysis—they at times also indicate whether a given
linguistic element in a text is written by means of phonograms or mor-
phograms, or whether it is not reflected at all in writing.<fnref n="23" /> For phono-
grams a further distinction may be made, depending on the exact type

<footnote n="22">22. A well-known exception to this general lack of a visual distinction is found in the mode of inscription known as *senmyō-gaki* 宣命書 (lit. ‘writing style of the edicts’), making use of half-size versus normal-size graphs, corresponding by and large to phonograms versus morphograms respectively.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23. This latter category of unwritten elements is often not distinguished from morphographically encoded elements in Romanizations. A notable exception is the scheme employed in the Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese (available online at https://oncoj.ninjal.ac.jp/): Here, unwritten elements are transcribed in lower case letters just as morphographically written elements are, but only the former are additionally marked by underlining.</footnote>
of phonogram involved: so-called *ongana* 音仮名 (with sound values ulti-
mately deriving from some variety of Chinese) or *kungana* 訓仮名 (with
sound values deriving from Old Japanese morphemes associated with a
given graph when used as a morphogram). While this may seem cum-
bersome at first, such precision in Romanizations is arguably well jus-
tified in the case of the 8th century poetic anthology *Man'yōshū* 万葉集
due to the diversity and complexity seen here in terms of the modes of
inscription.

The intricacies involved in such approaches to Romanization are best illustrated by a concrete example. Below we quote poem no. 70 from book I of the *Man'yōshū* together with two transcriptions and the corresponding translations. The one given on the right is taken from a recent scholarly edition of the text (Vovin, 2017), the one on the left from an entry in Bentley's (2016) dictionary of Old Japanese phonograms.

<table><caption>TABLE 1. Two modern transcriptions of *Man'yōshū* I/70 in contrast</caption>
  <tr>
    <td>(1) 倭尔者</td>
    <td>YAMATO ni PA</td>
    <td>YAMATÖ-ni pa</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>(2) 鳴而歟来良武</td>
    <td>NAKITE KA KUramu</td>
    <td>NAK-Î-TE ka K-Uram-u</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>(3) 呼兒烏</td>
    <td>YWOBU KWODORI</td>
    <td>YÔ<sup>m</sup>B-U kô<sup>-n</sup>-DÖRI</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>(4) 象乃<sup>24</sup>中山</td>
    <td>KISA no NAKAYAMA</td>
    <td>KISA-NÖ NAKA YAMA</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>(5) 呼曾越奈流</td>
    <td>YWOBI SO KWOYU naru</td>
    <td>YÔ<sup>m</sup>B-Î sö KÔY-U-nar-u</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3">Are they coming / to Yama-<br/>to as they call out? / I can<br/>hear the calling bird chicks /<br/>as they call out and fly over<br/>/ the mountains of Kisa.</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>(Bentley, 2016, p. 105)</td>
    <td></td>
    <td>(3) Calling small bird,<br/>(2) would [it] come crying<br/>(1) to Yamatö? (5) They say<br/>that it is [now] calling and<br/>crossing over (4) Elephant<br/>mountain [in the] middle.</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td></td>
    <td>(Vovin, 2017, p. 159)</td>
    <td></td>
  </tr>
</table>

It is apparent at first sight that there are substantial differences be-
tween the respective Romanization schemes employed, in the degree
and details of the morphological analysis, as well as in the interpreta-
tion and translation of the poem. These differences do not, however,
concern us here. It is important to note though that while Vovin distin-
guishes between ‘logograms’ (i.e., morphograms) vs. phonograms only,
transcribing them using upper case vs. lower case letters respectively,
Bentley in fact has a tripartite division: ‘Logograms’ are given in small

<footnote n="24">24. Most modern editions (Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū among others) have ㄋهي as an *ongana*-type phonogram for /no/ here. This is also true for the text as quoted and transcribed in Bentley (2016, p. 105). Vovin (2017, p. 159) on the other hand follows Kinoshita (2001), who has 之 as a morphogram for =no ‘attributive’ rather than ㄋهي. The difference in transcription between Vovin and Bentley does thus not derive from a difference in interpretation.</footnote>
caps, while phonograms are written in lower case (*ongana*) or upper case letters (*kungana*), depending on the exact type.

Of special interest here are the three characters marked in gray, which are as follows together with the relevant morphemes they are associated with in Literary Chinese: *zhě* 者 ‘topicalizer,’ *yú* 歡 ‘interrogative,’ and *ér* 兒 ‘child.’ In the poem quoted above they are employed to write the meaning- or function-wise equivalent Old Japanese morphemes =*pa* ‘topicalizer,’ =*ka* ‘interrogative,’ and *kwo* ‘child’ (which in Vovin’s analysis, however, is interpreted as a prefix *kwo*- ‘diminutive’ deriving from the noun *kwo* ‘child’ etymologically and written as *kô* in his Romanization scheme). Now, Vovin’s transcription uses lower case letters in all three cases, indicating an interpretation as phonograms. Bentley on the other hand only considers 歡 to act as a phonogram here (more specifically as a *kungana*), but interprets the other two graphs as ‘logograms.’<fnref n="25" />

Even in the only case in which the two interpretations coincide, the exact reasoning behind them is unclear. Inventories of *hentaigana* typically list ㄕ /ha/ (from earlier /fa/ < /pa/) and ㄈ /ka/,<fnref n="26" /> but while these cursive forms of 者 and (to a much lesser extent) of 歡 are attested in *later* times, this is strictly speaking irrelevant for their status within the Old Japanese writing system. In his entry for the phonogram 歡 /ka/, Bentley (2016, p. 105) even notes that “while there are a large number of examples, they all seem to be transcribing the question particle *ka*.” Indeed, 歡 is virtually limited to writing interrogative =*ka* in the *Man’yōshū*,<fnref n="27" /> which in view of its Chinese model *yú* 歡 ‘interrogative’ strongly suggests an interpretation as a morphogram. For a convincing argument in favor of an interpretation as a mere phonogram, we should at least expect the same graph to write the syllable /ka/ in various different contexts, regardless of the respective meaning of the morphemes involved. As long as that is not the case, the situation here with 歡 is no different from other cases of morphograms with similar Chinese models, whether in the poem quoted above or elsewhere.

<footnote n="25">25. In fact, the situation is even more complex than the comparison of this single poem suggests, as Vovin does interpret 者 as a ‘logogram’ for =*pa* on other occasions. See, e.g., poems I/2 and I/16 in the same volume (Vovin, 2017, pp. 21, 67).</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26. See, e.g., Kana Study Group (1988, p. 14) or Ijichi (1986, p. 6) among various others.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27. Apart from I/70, 歡 for =*ka* is attested in III/331, IV/497, 511 as well as more than a dozen other cases in the anthology. The only apparent exception to this is found in poem XVII/3909, where =*moga* ‘desiderative’ is written as 毛歡. In the light of the fact that =*moga* has been proposed to etymologically derive from =*mo ar.an.u=*ka (see Rickmeyer, 1986, p. 210), which is convincing on phonological, morphosyntactic as well as semantic grounds, this apparent exception still involves =*ka*. Also cf. Ōno (1977, p. 336, etc.) who does not posit 歡 /ka/ as a *kungana* at all in the *Man’yōshū*.</footnote>
The case of き is slightly different, as the graph is already attested as a phonogram for /pa/ in the Old Japanese corpus, albeit only as an exceedingly rare one. For the Man'yōshū itself Bentley (2016, p. 276) cites a single example (in poem XVI/3800)—and according to the detailed data provided by Ōno (1977, pp. 581, 586) this is indeed the only instance to be found in the entire anthology. In inventories of Old Japanese phonograms it is likewise not listed for any other of the received texts from that period (see, e.g., Omodaka, 1967, p. 899). In more casual contexts such as writing on wooden tablets (mokkan 木簡) /pa/ appears to have been somewhat more widespread,<fnref n="28" /> and this might be what formed the basis for the rapid increase in attestations (especially of the above-mentioned bentaigana 赤 based on /a/) in the centuries to come. In any case, clear-cut attestations of /a/ /pa/ as a kungana are exceedingly few in number, while instances of /a/ to write =pa='topicalizer' and (etymologically or functionally) related morphemes abound. The fact that this use is well in line with its Literary Chinese model of zhè /a/ 'topicalizer' again suggests an interpretation as a morphogram in the vast majority of cases, including the one in poem I/70 quoted above. Similar observations apply to the case of 兒, the details of which we may however skip here.

In the end it thus seems most appropriate to regard all three graphs marked in gray as morphograms in the poem in question, but the point here is not to discuss right and wrong—what is far more important here is what has led to the disagreement between Bentley and Vovin (and our own view as outlined above), namely the inherent ambiguity in the Old Japanese writing system and the ample room for diverging interpretations it thereby provides.

By far not all functional morphemes in Old Japanese could as easily be written morphographically as was the case with =pa= and =ka= in the preceding example, for which obvious Chinese models suggested themselves. In a quite different fashion, certain Chinese characters such as 鴨—morphographically writing the word kamo 'duck' in the first place—were used to write homophonous functional morphemes, in this case the exclamatory particle combination =ka=mo. Consider the set of examples from the Man'yōshū belonging to this type in Table 2, all involving disyllabic words.<fnref n="29" />

These derived spellings for functional morphemes are typically classified as phonograms or more precisely as kungana (see Wenck, 1954,

<footnote n="28">28. See the Wooden Tablet Database of the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, e.g., entries https://mokkanko.nabunken.go.jp/ja/6ACCNH18000104 (one of the many tablets featuring the Naniwazu poem, with き奈 for pana 'blossoms') or https://mokkanko.nabunken.go.jp/ja/6BFKBR43000001 (with 久者牟夜 for kup.am.u=ya 'shall I/we eat?').</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29. The number of attestations of each usage in the Man'yōshū is taken from Yoshioka (2019, pp. 28–34).</footnote>
<table><caption>TABLE 2. Typologically disputable spellings of functional morphemes</caption><thead><tr><th>Graph</th><th>Original value</th><th>Attestations</th><th>Derived value</th><th>Attestations</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>鴨</td><td>kamo 'duck'</td><td>21</td><td>=ka=mo 'exclamation'</td><td>318</td></tr><tr><td>庭</td><td>nipa 'garden'</td><td>20</td><td>=ni=pa 'dative + topic'</td><td>41</td></tr><tr><td>谷</td><td>tani 'valley'</td><td>4</td><td>=dani 'even (as little as)'</td><td>67</td></tr><tr><td>管</td><td>tutu 'pipe'</td><td>0</td><td>-tutu 'iterative'</td><td>84</td></tr></tbody></table>

p. 51; Vovin, 2017, p. 9, among many others), which is however debatable: Disyllabic sound values such as /kamo/ or /nipa/ are too specific in terms of pronunciation to spell any substantial number of other morphemes or strings of morphemes than those given above, such as the particle combinations =ka=mo or =ni=pa. The phonographic use in such cases is thus naturally confined to a single morpheme or a single string of morphemes (compare this to the deliberate narrowing of the use of ま for nothing but =o 'accusative' in the modern standard orthography, as discussed in section 3). It is precisely due to the limited productivity of such phonograms that a re-analysis as morphograms suggests itself. This is further supported by the fact that the above-mentioned characters are in fact much more often used in their derived values than in their original values, at least as far as the corpus of Old Japanese poetry is concerned. While strictly speaking irrelevant for the Old Japanese period, it is also worthwhile to note that the same association of, e.g., 鴨 with =ka=mo is still observed in manuscripts of later poetic anthologies, most prominently of the early 10th century Kokin waka-shū 古今和歌集.<fnref n="30" />

Our final example in this section pertains to certain renderings of proper nouns that go back to Old Japanese times but are still current today—and which likewise pose difficulties for distinguishing phonograms from morphograms. Consider the following toponym spellings: Awa (< Old Japanese Apa) 阿波, Izu (< Idu) 伊豆, Iga 伊賀, Ise 伊勢, Kaga 加賀, Mino (< Minwo) 美濃, Nara 奈良, Noto 能登, etc. All of these spellings consist of what used to be commonplace phonograms in Old Japanese, so that syllables in any word could be written using these graphs: 阿 for /a/, 波 for /pa/, etc. At the same time, they were conventionalized as official spellings from early on, many already in the 8th century. In other words, the first half of the name Apa, for example, came to be written by 阿 /a/—and therefore not by 安 /a/, another commonplace phonogram for the same sound value. Wherever the inventory of common-

<footnote n="30">30. For =ka=mo 鴨 see, e.g., poem II/121 in the Gen'ei 元永 manuscript, or poem IX/406 in the Sujigire 筋切 fragments of the Kokin waka-shū, both dating from the 12th century.</footnote>
place phonograms provides more than one option for a given syllable, the morphonographic nature of these spellings becomes obvious: The choice between 阿 vs. 安 /a/, 勢 vs. 世 /se/, 賀 vs. 我 /ga/ etc. is clearly determined on a name- and thus morpheme-specific basis.

The typological status of these graphs later changed as a side-effect of the replacement, approximately in the 9th century, of full phonograms with simplified ones as in the modern *katakana* (ア /a/ < 阿, etc.) and *bira-gana* (は /ha/ < 波, etc.). Even during and after this change, the toponym spellings remained unchanged—and in fact they remain unchanged up to the present day in these cases. Graphically speaking, they thus still preserve traits of the Old Japanese writing system, in which phonograms and morphograms were both clearly sinographic and not yet visually distinct. What does this mean for our interpretation of a spelling such as 阿波 for Awa today? As neither of the two graphs is in general use as a phonogram anymore, the only two options are to view the spelling as being morphonographic (i.e., still involving a phonographic mapping, but with a name-specific choice of phonograms) or as being *en bloc* already morphographic in nature. The decision between these two options essentially depends on whether we posit a phonographic subsystem in the modern Japanese writing system that is chiefly used for proper nouns (see section 5 for examples involving personal rather than place names) and relies on sinograms rather than *hiragana* or *katakana*. Without assuming such a phonographic subsystem, spellings such as those quoted above could only be interpreted as digraphic morphograms.

## 5. Semantically Motivated Phonograms

In writing systems featuring both phonograms and morphograms with overlapping inventories of signs, as for instance in Chinese and Japanese (especially in its earliest stage), phonograms are not necessarily alone chosen with regard to the best possible fit in terms of pronunciation. Far from discarding potential meanings altogether, considerations of semantics may play—and *have* often played—a significant role as well. The phenomenon of semantically motivated phonograms is less often observed for practical writing in ordinary contexts. It instead seems to be particularly prevalent in phonographic representations of proper nouns or in ambitious modes of inscription as reflections of artistic expression, e.g., in poetry. The prerequisite for this is the open-ended nature of the phonographic subsystems in these cases, as in theory any morphogram associated with a morpheme that provides a sufficiently close match for a given pronunciation can be turned into a phonogram for the latter. Especially with laxer standards as to the precision of the phonetic match, there are thus typically at least a few candidates available for each sound value. At this point, the circumstances succinctly summarized by Han-
del (2019, p. 36) take effect: “Because a morpheme, by definition, has both phonological shape and semantic content, each Chinese character has, for users of the script, one or more associated pronunciations and meanings, namely those of the morpheme(s) that it normally writes.” Each graph is therefore equipped with the potential of specific semantic allusions on top of having a certain sound value. Such cases of semantically motivated phonograms thus clearly depend on—and would be unthinkable without—the morphographic use of the same graphs in other contexts, but they must be distinguished from actual morphograms, as will become apparent from the examples discussed in this section.

Our first set of examples is again taken from sinographically written Old Japanese of the 8th c. In elaborate, playful modes of inscription as seen in the aforementioned poetic anthology *Man'yōshū*, some phonograms are clearly semantically motivated, as various scholars have pointed out (see Wenck, 1954; Ōno, 1957; Wittkamp, 2009 among many others). For instance, graphs that in other contexts are used as morphograms for certain words are at times also employed as phonograms to write a portion of precisely these words. Consider the first case given in Table 3 below: The character 反 is well attested as a morphogram for *kapyer.u* 'to return,' but it also occurs together with other phonograms to spell the same word, phonographically. In the latter case the character merely represents a single syllable of that word, namely /pye/. A comparison with the Middle Chinese sound value of the graph, i.e., *puan*, further shows that 反 is not even a particularly good phonetic match for /pye/, but arguably the semantic match made up for the discrepancy in sound.<fnref n="31" /> It is therefore hardly coincidental that 反 /pye/ and the other phonograms listed below show a skewed distribution and, depending on the case, either rarely or never occur to write the indicated syllables in any other words.

In other cases, the semantics do not match entirely, but instead special phonograms are used for allusions to related words, thus adding a layer of meaning. A case in point is the spelling 孤悲 (Middle Chinese *kō-pi*) for the verb form *kwopwi* 'longing' and etymologically related words.<fnref n="32" /> These phonograms are again virtually limited to writing the syllables /kwopwi/ in the same small set of closely related words over and over again. It therefore does not only seem safe to assume that their choice is intentional, readers are even almost forced to recognize their semantic allusion to being 'alone and sad.' However, not all cases are as straightforward as this one—and there is but a fine line between

<footnote n="31">31. The (Early) Middle Chinese reconstructions provided here and in the following are taken from Pulleyblank (1991).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32. In the *Man'yōshū* the two graphs are attested as a spelling of *kwopwi* as a verb form (I/67, IV/560, IX/1778, etc.), of *kwopwi* 'longing' as a deverbal noun (III/325, XV/3652, XVII/3929, etc.), and also in the related adjective *kwopwisi* 'to be longing' (XVII/3957, 3978, 3987, etc.).</footnote>