400 Sprache, Linguistik
Refine
Year of publication
- 2022 (1)
Document Type
- Article (1)
Language
- English (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (1)
Keywords
- writing (1) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (1)
Publisher
- de Gruyter (1)
The question of whether a letter is a grapheme or not is a perennial issue in writing research. The answer depends on which criteria are used to differentiate between letters and graphemes and, ultimately,how the unit ‘grapheme’ is defined. This problem is particularly relevant to complex graphemes, i.e. sequences of letters that behave like a single grapheme in certain respects. Typical for German is the ‹ch›. This paper argues for a scalar concept of graphemes, which compares the grapheme status of each of the units under investigation. For this purpose, new criteria for the identification of complex graphemes are used, which originate from handwriting analysis. There, it is shown that complex graphemes are connected with each other disproportionately often and also have deviating letter forms disproportionately often.