What Is a Written Word? And if So, How Many?

Abstract

In the analysis of written language, the distribution of the punctuation marks dot, exclamation mark, and question mark is usually explained with refer ence 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 ac tually 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 inter spersed 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 be longing 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 utter ance are completely independent of each other, since they belong to different areas of linguistics. A grapholinguistic analysis has to explain the wellformedness con ditions 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 grapholin