Naturalness in Language

Naturalness Theory (NT) is founded on the notion of naturalness and claims that when a linguistic phenomenon can be processed by humans with little effort, both sensomotorically and cognitively, it is deemed more natural compared to other, more complex phenomena. Drawing on evidence such as language change, language acquisition, and language disorders, various parameters of naturalness (e.g., biuniqueness, constructional iconicity) have been postulated, which focus on the phonological and morphological subsystems of language. This paper offers an outline of how naturalness can be extended to grapholinguistic phenomena. Comparative graphematics (cf. Weingarten 2011), extended to comparative grapholinguistics, is assessed as a method that can be used to reveal naturalness parameters which apply to both material (graphetic) and linguistic (graphematic) aspects of writing. The reduction of extrinsic symmetry across various scripts will be discussed as an example. By integrating these preliminary theoretical ideas into the framework of NT, it is demonstrated that so-called Natural Grapholinguistics could offer promising new insights as well as a tertium comparationis method for future comparative analyses of scripts and writing systems.

"This article has two main purposes. The first one is to prove that the alleged superiority of the alphabet to other writing systems (syllabic and logosyllabic ones) is an ethnocentric prejudice and that the optimality of a writing system has to be measured following a series of criteria which cannot be reduced to the faithful mapping of sounds. The second one is to incorporate into the graphemic theory external data and new approaches to develop new methods of investigation and to emancipate graphemics from phonology. The structure of the article is composed of seven parts. First of all, we discuss some definition problems; then, in the introduction, the main points of view about the alphabetic principle are exposed and in chapter 2 the relationships between writing systems and language perception
are investigated. In chapter 3 we attempt to define some criteria to judge the degree of optimality of the different writing systems. In chapter 4 we try to find some patterns of predictability of the degree of opacity and transparency of some of the main European writing systems (the opaque English, French and Danish orthographies and the shallow Finnish and
Italian orthographies). In chapter 5 we shortly examine the natural evolution of writing in recent times: Internet, SMS and new writing systems. Finally, in chapter 6 we try to draw some temporary conclusions."

Nei lavori precedenti, rifiutando l'interpretazione della conversione come suffissazione zero, abbiamo proposto un'analogia tra metafora semantica e conversione, identificando la conversione come una sorta di metafora morfologica (v. infra § 3.). Ma, d'altra parte, abbiamo continuato a considerare la conversione come un'operazione di derivazione, seppur atipica. Ora, pur non rinunciando alla definizione di conversione nei termini di metafora morfologica, riteniamo di poter inquadrare questo fenomeno come un'operazione di FP distinta tanto dalla derivazione quanto dalla composizione.

Writing is an eclectic phenomenon whose many facets are studied by the young interdisciplinary field of grapholinguistics. Linguistically, writing is a system of graphic marks that relate to language. Under the lens of processing, it is a method of producing and perceiving utterances with our hands, eyes, and brains. And from a communication theoretical and sociolinguistic perspective, it is an utterly personal medium that allows users not only to convey messages to others but also to associate themselves with cultures or ideologies. These perspectives must merge to become the foundation of a functional theory of grapholinguistics that aims not only to describe how writing systems are built but to explain why they are built that way. Starting with a unified framework that allows the description of all types of writing systems with comparative concepts (such as grapheme) and moving towards the incorporation of evidence from disciplines such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to arrive at explanations, this book establishes the cornerstones of such a functional theory of writing. The Nature of Writing is a collection of ideas about writing, a status report about relevant research, a discovery of desiderata, and a new perspective. It is a start, but most importantly, it is an invitation.

Abstract: This paper attempts a definition of consonant clusters, consonant cluster complexity, and cluster complexity reduction in a phonological perspective. In particular, since at the present stage of our knowledge a metrical (and thus: general) definition of consonant cluster complexity is not possible, a relative and structure-dependent concept is proposed: Only clusters within the scope of one and the same preference law can be compared, namely evaluated as the more complex the less preferred they are in terms of that preference law. This concept, as well as ways in which cluster complexity is reduced, are illustrated with examples from various languages. They include word-initial muta-cum-liquida reductions in Spanish and Portuguese, certain cases of “metathesis at a distance” (e.g. Spanish periglo > peligro ‘danger’), and slope displacements as in Old Italian ca.'pes.tro > ca.'pres.to ‘rope’, Tuscan pa.'dro.ne > pra.'do.ne ‘lord, employer’. The opposite kind of development, namely the formation and complexification of clusters, is argued for the most part not to be motivated by syllable structure preferences but (a) by a variety of syntactic and morphological processes and (b) in phonology itself by rhythmically induced copations (e.g. syncope in Latin periculo > Spanish periglo), or to result from borrowing.

""This article has two main purposes. The first one is to prove that the alleged superiority of the alphabet to other writing systems (syllabic and logosyllabic ones) is an ethnocentric prejudice and that the optimality of a writing system has to be measured following a series of criteria which cannot be reduced to the faithful mapping of sounds. The second one is to incorporate into the graphemic theory external data and new approaches to develop new methods of investigation and to emancipate graphemics from phonology. The structure of the article is composed of seven parts. First of all, we discuss some definition problems; then, in the introduction, the main points of view about the alphabetic principle are exposed and in chapter 2 the relationships between writing systems and language perception are investigated. In chapter 3 we attempt to define some criteria to judge the degree of optimality of the different writing systems. In chapter 4 we try to find some patterns of predictability of the degree of opacity and transparency of some of the main European writing systems (the opaque English, French and Danish orthographies and the shallow Finnish and Italian orthographies). In chapter 5 we shortly examine the natural evolution of writing in recent times: Internet, SMS and new writing systems. Finally, in chapter 6 we try to draw some temporary conclusions.""

Naturalness Theory (NT) is based on the notion of linguistic naturalness and postulates that linguistic phenomena that are structured in ways to make them relatively easy to process by humans physiologically, cognitively, and sociopragmatically are more natural than other, more complex phenomena. Drawing on evidence such as language change, language acquisition, and language disorders, various parameters of naturalness have been proposed. These, thus far, focus primarily on the phonological and morphological subsystems of language. This dissertation is, on the one hand, an (1) extension of NT as it offers an outline of how the notion of naturalness can be transferred to grapholinguistic phenomena. To achieve this, typologically highly diverse scripts and writing systems must be compared to identify naturalness parameters at the universal, typological, and system-specific levels for both the material (graphetic) and linguistic (graphematic) subsystems of writing. Such a comparison requires a shared descriptive and terminological framework, which is why this dissertation provides, on the other hand, an (2) outline of a descriptive grapholinguistics complete with definitions of graphetic and graphematic categories, most notably the grapheme. Through merging the theoretical tenets of NT with a systematic analysis of writing, this dissertation demonstrates that a so-called Natural Grapholinguistics offers promising new insights as well as a tertium comparationis for future comparative analyses of scripts and writing systems. The end result is a first sketch of a theory of writing that, as a theory, does not stop at the description of the structure of writing systems, but is capable of explaining why they are built the way they are.

In "Schöne Künste, in Paris geschrieben d. 2. Dec." (1769), based on his experience of spectator and commenting on Lekain’s acting, Herder complains about the fact that no “natural cry” nor “natural passion” can occur on stage . Alongside Diderot, Herder thus wishes for more naturalness in theater, that is, a type of expression characteristic of the “sensitive being”, whose objective consists less in designating the world as in spontaneously exteriorizing sensations.

Obwohl die Schriftlinguistik ein aktuell aufstrebender Teilbereich der Sprachwissenschaft ist, bleibt eine Schrifttheorie, die die Struktur von Schriftsystemen nicht nur beschreibt, sondern auch danach strebt, sie zu erklären, bis heute ein Desideratum. In diesem Vortrag wird erläutert, wie Prämissen der linguistischen Natürlichkeitstheorie bei der Konstruktion einer erklärenden Schrifttheorie helfen können. So kann die materiell orientierte Natürliche Phonologie (Donegan & Stampe 2009), die sich mit physiologischen Prozessen beschäftigt, die die Artikulation und Perzeption gesprochener Sprache erleichtern, eine analoge Natürliche Graphetik prägen, die die materielle Ebene von Schrift sowie der damit assoziierten Schreib- und Leseprozesse behandelt. Die Prämissen der semiotisch fundierten Natürlichen Morphologie (Dressler & Kilani-Schoch 2016), welche die Eigenschaften der semiotischen Struktur sprachlicher Zeichen und deren Ein-fluss auf die kognitive Verarbeitung untersucht, können die Eckpfeiler einer Natürlichen Gra-phematik darstellen, die die Struktur schriftlicher Zeichen – u. a. Graphemen als semiotischen Verbindungen von visuellen signantia und sprachlichen signata – in den Fokus rückt.
Mit diesem natürlichkeitstheoretischen Fundament kann erklärt werden, warum Schriftsysteme so aussehen, wie sie heute aussehen. Erklärungen werden dabei weiter unterteilt in drei Bereiche: linguistische, verarbeitungstechnische und soziokulturelle. Linguistisch kann untersucht werden, wie Schriftsysteme als sekundäre, visuelle semiotische Systeme sich dem jeweiligen zugrunde liegenden Sprachsystem (als primärem semiotischen System) anpassen. Verarbeitungstechnisch gilt, was Dehaene (2009) konstatiert: Schrift ist als Erfindung zu jung, als dass Menschen sich evolutionär an sie hätten anpassen können, also war es umgekehrt – Schrift passte sich unserer Biologie und Kognition an. Drittens bleibt für Schrift als Kulturtechnik die hochrelevante soziokulturelle Dimension. Schriftsysteme sind geprägt durch die Bedürfnisse von literaten Sprachgemeinschaften. Sie erlauben es, sich als Individuum oder Gruppe sozial zu präsentieren, zu positionieren etc. Diese drei Dimensionen spiegeln sich in der diachronen Ent-wicklung von Schrift sowie ihrer synchronen Struktur wider.
In diesem Vortrag werden die Grundpfeiler einer natürlichen Schriftlinguistik sowie die drei genannten Erklärungsdimensionen anhand von Beispielen aus den diversesten Schriftsystemen – Deutsch, Chinesisch, Thailändisch, Arabisch, Koreanisch – vorgestellt und illustriert.


Dehaene, Stanislas (2009): Reading in the brain: the new science of how we read. London: Penguin.
Donegan, Patricia & David Stampe (2009): Hypotheses of Natural Phonology. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45.1: 1-31. DOI: 10.2478/v10010-009-0002-x
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Marianne Kilani-Schoch (2016): Natural Morphology. In Andrew Hippisley & Gregory Stump (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology, 356-389. Cambridge: CUP.

A longitudinal study of verb morphology in conversations between parents and a girl aged 22 to 36 months (1; 10 - 3; 0) confirms the assumption that the child responds to the typological characteristics of Slovenian and that morphological diversity promotes the development of distinctive functions in her speech. The paper uses a constructivist approach based on the assumptions of the theory of naturalness (Dressler et al. 1987) and distinguishes three stages in the morphological development of children's speech: premorphological, protomorphological and morphological (Dressler et al. 1997, Bittner et al. 2000, Laaha, et al. 2007). Based on the linguistic material of the girl, we distinguish three main steps in her early development of conjugation patterns.
At the pre-morphological developmental stage (i.e. up to the age of 2; 2), utterances without verbs predominate, and interjections occasionally appear in the role of action words. In rare contexts we find a handful of rote-learned verb forms of the indicative (3rd person singular) and imperative mood (2nd person singular). Unlike some other Slovenian children (cf. Kranjc, 1999; Rus, 2010), the girl rarely uses bare participles (e.g. čakala, engl. ‘wait’) or bare infinitives in this transitional period. The use of bare participles and infinitives in the early speech of Slovenian-speaking children seems to co-depend on the provided input morphology (ie child directed speech). According to Rus (2010), these constructions are more frequent in children's speech in Germanic and Romance languages. At the premorphological developmental stage, there are no formative oppositions, each verb appears in only one type.
At the transition between the pre- and protomorphological stage (between 2; 2 and 2; 5), we witness the first semantic oppositions between two verb forms, but only few of them meet the strict criteria for a miniparadigm. They are found first with the most common suppletive verbs (e.g. biti, imeti, iti, engl. ‘to be, to have, to go’) and to some extent also with verbs from productive and transparent micro classes (e.g. dati, papati, ninati, engl. ‘give, eat, sleep’).
At the protomorphological stage (i.e., approximately from age 2; 5.20 onwards), there is a noticeable expansion of semantic contrasts between verb forms and conjugation patterns, accompanied by increased average utterance length, increased number of verb (and noun) tokens and increased lexical diversity. The rapid increase in the number of verbs (verb spurt), which began at the transition between the pre- and protomorphological stage, continues at a similar rate (10 or more new verbs during a single session). The rise of verb lemmas and their tokens certainly indicate a close relationship between lexical and morphological development (cf. Bates et al. 1995). At the protomorphological level, formative oppositions spread to new verb classes. We can find analogies that reveal to us that the girl creatively transfers her knowledge of Slovenian morphology, which she acquired by choosing forms and patterns from the utterances of her interlocutors, to new verbs: e.g. the girl conjugates the irregular verb rezati (engl. ‘to cut’) in the same way as the above mentioned verbs dati, ninati or papati, ie according to a productive and transparent conjugation pattern). At the protomorphological stage, complex verb structures (descriptive participles on -l combined with the auxiliary biti, deontic modal verbs, past and future tense forms) also appear on a regular basis, although their miniparadigms are even less complete than those of the present tense forms. It is only from the age of 3; 0 onwards that the first prefix verb forms appear in the girl's utterances, which gives rise to the emergence of perfective and imperfective verb form oppositions.

A longitudinal study of verb morphology in conversations between parents and a girl aged 22 to 36 months (1; 10 - 3; 0) confirms the assumption that the child responds to the typological characteristics of Slovenian and that morphological diversity promotes the development of distinctive functions in her speech. The paper uses a constructivist approach based on the assumptions of the theory of naturalness (Dressler et al. 1987) and distinguishes three stages in the morphological development of children's speech: premorphological, protomorphological and morphological (Dressler et al. 1997, Bittner et al. 2000, Laaha, et al. 2007). Based on the linguistic material of the girl, we distinguish three main steps in her early development of conjugation patterns.
At the pre-morphological developmental stage (i.e. up to the age of 2; 2), utterances without verbs predominate, and interjections occasionally appear in the role of action words. In rare contexts we find a handful of rote-learned verb forms of the indicative (3rd person singular) and imperative mood (2nd person singular). Unlike some other Slovenian children (cf. Kranjc, 1999; Rus, 2010), the girl rarely uses bare participles (e.g. čakala, engl. ‘wait’) or bare infinitives in this transitional period. The use of bare participles and infinitives in the early speech of Slovenian-speaking children seems to co-depend on the provided input morphology (ie child directed speech). According to Rus (2010), these constructions are more frequent in children's speech in Germanic and Romance languages. At the premorphological developmental stage, there are no formative oppositions, each verb appears in only one type.
At the transition between the pre- and protomorphological stage (between 2; 2 and 2; 5), we witness the first semantic oppositions between two verb forms, but only few of them meet the strict criteria for a miniparadigm. They are found first with the most common suppletive verbs (e.g. biti, imeti, iti, engl. ‘to be, to have, to go’) and to some extent also with verbs from productive and transparent micro classes (e.g. dati, papati, ninati, engl. ‘give, eat, sleep’).
At the protomorphological stage (i.e., approximately from age 2; 5.20 onwards), there is a noticeable expansion of semantic contrasts between verb forms and conjugation patterns, accompanied by increased average utterance length, increased number of verb (and noun) tokens and increased lexical diversity. The rapid increase in the number of verbs (verb spurt), which began at the transition between the pre- and protomorphological stage, continues at a similar rate (10 or more new verbs during a single session). The rise of verb lemmas and their tokens certainly indicate a close relationship between lexical and morphological development (cf. Bates et al. 1995). At the protomorphological level, formative oppositions spread to new verb classes. We can find analogies that reveal to us that the girl creatively transfers her knowledge of Slovenian morphology, which she acquired by choosing forms and patterns from the utterances of her interlocutors, to new verbs: e.g. the girl conjugates the irregular verb rezati (engl. ‘to cut’) in the same way as the above mentioned verbs dati, ninati or papati, ie according to a productive and transparent conjugation pattern). At the protomorphological stage, complex verb structures (descriptive participles on -l combined with the auxiliary biti, deontic modal verbs, past and future tense forms) also appear on a regular basis, although their miniparadigms are even less complete than those of the present tense forms. It is only from the age of 3; 0 onwards that the first prefix verb forms appear in the girl's utterances, which gives rise to the emergence of perfective and imperfective verb form oppositions.