Graphemics
Under graphemics (also: graphematics, other spellings: Grafemik, Grafematik ) is defined after the Hadumod Bußmann the study of writing systems of natural and constructed languages.
Subject
The linguistic sub-discipline examines the regularities inherent in the written expressions of a language (texts ) and are in what proportion these regularities in the development and fixation of a standard font ( orthography ).
Examines the units of a particular writing system for a in terms of their sense-discriminative function ( determination of the Grapheminventars and the morphological and syntactic function of the graphemes, see below) and also as regards their relations with the phonetic structure of the language (eg, phoneme - grapheme be correspondences ). Various investigations are not, among other things, the breakdown by the lexical principle ( capitalize a word), the syllabic principle ( syllable joint letters in eg liquid se, Fal -le or Langvokalisierung as in cream, meal ) or the sakralischen principle (word receipt by large Ukumbierung ).
Graphemic (eg graphotaktische ) Investigations are used in practice, especially a foundation of existing orthographic standards ( for example in relation to the educational placement of the written language ), the decoding of historical texts and the implementation of systems of writing in suitable for processing systems within the computational linguistics.
The individual elements in the written interpretation of language are called ( in analogy to phoneme and Phon in phonology ) grapheme. The term grapheme fall in German the 30 letters, including the German special characters ( umlaut letters and "ß": a- zäöüß, under certain circumstances, é, the uppercase letters, however, can be considered as allographs of these graphemes, see below) and the number and after some approaches even the punctuation.
A graph is the smallest writing realized (material) unit, a grapheme, however, the smallest functional or distinctive unit ( see also the names of characters, English character, versus Glyph -. These terms are but unlike grapheme and graph rather across languages and - used independently ).
In analogy to the terms phonology / phoneme (at) ik and phonetics and the study area of the purely material side of the written language is called Graphetik ( palaeography, typography, graphology ).
The grapheme as a functional unit of a written language is independent of the specifically implemented ( handwritten or typographical ) form, that is the graph ( ɑ the different graphs, a, A are, for example allographic variants of the grapheme ). The extent to which a grapheme from a plurality of graphs ( di-and trigraphs, such as sh, ch or ie in German ) can be made is disputed within graphemics.
According to some theoretical approaches a grapheme can consist of multiple graphs, either, because after some older approaches a grapheme is defined directly as a representation of a phoneme ( "sh" for the phoneme / ʃ / ), or because of distributional or graphotaktischen reasons a graph sequence is classified as a unit ( "sh" is found in positions in the word, where else can happen only individual graphs, " strap on " and see " popping "). But widespread is the view that such letter combinations ( phonemunabhängig considered and also distributional justifiable ) usually combinations of several graphemes (see, for example, sees the minimal pair - visibility ).