Franziska Buchmann

Our paper states our position on Rezec (2010). In his paper, he tries to deconstruct Primus' letter analysis (Primus 2004), portraying it as implausible on the whole. In Primus (2004), the author describes the form of lowercase letters and begins to establish a system that relates the letters' graphic features to the corresponding sounds' phonological features. In this paper, we fiercly reject Rezec's theses and give reasons why we agree with Primus' approach. We argue on the basis of the graphematic syllable and the length hierarchy, both presented in Fuhrhop/Buchmann (2009). Compared to Primus' system, we only had to make one major change (the implementation of skewness) in order to answer a question completely different from the one posed by Primus. We clearly regard this as a strength of Primus' system.

Minuscules of the Latin alphabet can be divided into letters with length (for example ) and letters without length (for example ). This observation leads to the concept of a graphematic syllable. While plosives, which correspond to graphemes with length, occur at the syllable edge, vowels, corresponding to graphemes without length, occur in the syllable core. In this paper, we develop a (so-called) length hierarchy in analogy to the phonological sonority hierarchy. Since so far, the feature 'length' has been binary, we present a scalar feature of length required by the hierarchy. Every letter is divided into a head and a coda (s. Primus 2006), the form of the head representing the position in the hierarchy. Our length hierarchy operates with graphematic properties exclusively, thus avoiding phonological ones. Based on the length hierarchy, a graphematic principle of syllable structure can be formulated (analogous to a phonological principle of syllable structure, known as the sonority sequencing principle). Although this idea is developed for German, we show how we can deal with the problematic , which represents a potential syllable core with length in English.

This paper introduces the idea of graphematic word formation. For this purpose, I will discuss the criteria of morphological word formation with respect to abbreviations ending in an abbreviation mark: means ,abbreviation' or means ,for example'. The criteria are: 1. There is a semantic shift between the original unit and the newly formed unit. 2. The newly formed unit may develop its own inflection. 3. The newly formed unit may belong to a different part of speech as the original unit. 4. The newly formed unit may consist of direct and binary constituents. 5. The newly formed unit may be linked to a proper pronunciation. Abbreviations fulfill the criteria, which are necessary for morphological word formation but they do not develop a proper pronunciation. An abbreviation's semantics can differ from the semantics of the original longer term and abbreviations can develop its own plural inflection. The paper's second part deals with the graphematic structure of abbreviations. Abbreviations ending with one abbreviation mark consist of three to five letters on average. They build graphematic syllables like any other graphematic word. Internal majuscules can furthermore occur in abbreviations as well as in acronyms to structure the graphematic word. The divis is suggested to function as a graphematic linking element.