Niklas Reinken

There are strict formal requirements for the use of a comma. However, there are none regarding the comma’s actual shape. In printed fonts, it is determined by the font’s specification. In handwritten texts though, the shape of the comma is variable; most writers choose from a set of straight, convex and concave shapes. By using a corpus of 1464 commas written by 99 individuals, we will present three case studies of persons whose comma shapes do somehow correlate with linguistic structures. With that, we might identify a few (possibly subconscious) shaping strategies. Some writers might mark a norm insecurity by a different comma form, others might mark the function of the entity which is segmented by the comma, or the comma type itself (sentence boundary, exposition or coordination).

Quotation marks are substantially used for direct speech and citations. For the ‘modalizing’ use, the Official Rules state that a “different understanding than usual” is indicated; they give very little information on the use of quotation marks beyond literal reference. It therefore seems all the more interesting to investigate the usage of modalizing quotation marks. In the present analysis, we studied the school-leaving examinations of an entire year. School-leaving examinations are texts by persons whose institutional acquisition of written language can be regarded as complete; they are texts written by skilled writers. The investigation takes into account both formal and functional observations. We recognized differences between school subjects that can be interpreted with regard to the concept of educational language. The writers described here showed a high sensitivity (conscious or unconscious) to the use of quotation marks, which we call the “struggle for educational language”. This may be related to the corpus investigated here. However, our study constitutes a solid basis for further corpus studies on quotation marks.

In contrast to printed letters, handwritten texts show a larger amount of variation regarding letter shape and letter contact. This variation though might not be totally random but could follow a certain grammatical or structural function. By analysing a corpus of 10.117 graphs written by four writers, this paper explores which structures and which functions correlate. More precisely, it will be shown that the shape of certain letters might indicate syllabic, morphologic od prosodic structures. In addition, it will be shown that handwritten texts present the words’ structure better than printed texts could do. Overall, this paper points out how handwritten scripts show the graphematic principles known from printing even better than printed texts do.

Abstracts

Dehé, Nicole, Braun, Bettina, Einfeldt, Marieke, Wochner, Daniela, Zahner-Ritter, Katharina: The prosody of rhetorical questions: a cross-linguistic view.
This paper provides a survey of our knowledge of the prosody of r [...]

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