Constraints On Error Variables In Grammar

An in-depth investigation of constraints on error variables in grammar with special reference to bilingual misspelling orthographies. A corpus of errors is examined in minute detail. In the course of this analysis, received categories and standard assumptions about linguistic errors are critically scrutinized; some are sharpened, and others are abandoned. Many conceptual snarls having to do with the notion of error in linguistic performance are untangled in this book.

Philip Luelsdorff's highly original approach to the grammar of orthography is to analyse in detail how German pupils learn about written English. In this collection of essays and experiments we are presented with the rich finds of a decade of programmatic research. The context is set with an exposition of current cognitive models of reading and spelling. Cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics meet in Luelsdorff's concept of linguistic error. This concept forms the basis from which it is possible to derive the grammar that governs our largely unconscious and vast knowledge of written words. It is proper to talk about a grammar for both orthographic and syntactic aspects of language. This is because spelling knowledge is not piecemeal or erratic but bears all the hallmarks of a system. Through second language orthography the author is showing us a new view of this advanced stage of spelling knowledge and its acquisition. This view is exciting because it seems now possible to form very detailed hypotheses as regards first language spelling about the order in which purely orthographic knowledge is developed.

The fourth volume of the revived series of “Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague” brings three contributions (by J. Vachek, O. Le?ka and V. Skalicka) connected with the classical period of the Prague School, as well as papers delivered at the conference “Function, Form, and Meaning: Bridges and Interfaces”, held in Prague in 1998. Some of the contributions concern issues of grammar of different languages including a syntactic annotation of a large Czech text corpus, a comparison of Hebrew conditionals with English, a characterization of the typology of the Indo-European verb. A further part focuses on topic-focus articulation (information sentence structure, functional sentence perspective), with a concept of 'perspective' introduced as close to but distinct from 'topic' and with three different viewpoints on the semantics of information structure. Two broader essays on the nature of language are then presented, while the last section analyzes the structure of free verse. The volume represents a contribution to the continuing fruitful interaction between the work of the Prague School and the more and less closely related approaches of linguists in other countries.

The aim of this volume is to witness how the activities of the Prague School have continued to bring important new insights and discussions between the 1940s and the present time. Contributions are included which have escaped attention on an international scale because they were published in Czech; several papers have been written especially for this volume. The contributions cover various domains: syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics, graphemics, the language system, the lexicon, and contrastive linguistics.

In this distinguished collection the deeper cognitive aspects of writing systems are for the first time added to the perceptual and physiological dimensions and brought into a coherent whole. The result is a multifaceted understanding of alphabets and other scripts in which none of the major factors that shape those systems, and thus distinctively reveal attributes of the human mind, are slighted. The systems through which language is realized on the page are compared in nature and complexity with those through which language is realized as sound, and are seen in their true perspective. Long the object of intensive inquiry, the process of change in phonological systems is now joined to the evolution of graphological systems, and new light is cast on the nature of the relevant human cognitive processes in their diversity and underlying unity. The authors, each eminently qualified in his or her field, are drawn from Europe, Asia, and North and South America.

This exceptional book of selected essays by the leading Czech linguist and member of the Prague Linguistic Circle contains 26 essays in English and 4 in German. It presents the wide scope of Sgall's interest and in six parts introduces the main spheres of author's interest - the first part of the book deals with general and theoretical questions, the second contains Sgall's contribution to syntax, the third covers the functional sentence perspective, the fourth sentences and discourse, the fifth language typology and the last part covers speech and writing

Collected here are eleven papers devoted to various aspects of the orthography/phonology interface. Topics include spelling-to-sound correspondence for English, French, and Russian, the design of a generative phonology for orthography data-base access, the linguistic sign and orthographic and phonological error, the analysis of Greenlandic school children s spelling errors, the orthographic representation of phonemic nasalization and its implications for prosodic theory, the psycholinguistics of phonological recoding in reading, orthography as a variable in psycholinguistic experiments, spelling and dialect, orthography and the typology of phonological rules, and orthography and historical phonology.

Second Language Writing Systems looks at how people learn and use a second language writing system, arguing that they are affected by characteristics of the first and second writing systems, to a certain extent independently of the languages involved. This book for the first time presents the effects of writing systems on second language reading and writing and on second language awareness, and provides a new platform for discussing bilingualism, biliteracy and writing systems.