Schriftsystem und Orthographie Ed. by Peter Eisenberg and Hartmut Günther (review)

BOOK NOTICES 649 trol structures, including generator expressions (expressions that produce a potentially infinite sequence of values), procedure suspension (which enables the user to write his or her own generator procedures), co-expressions and coroutines , control backtracking, and reversible assignment. These features are given very little attention, due no doubt to the elementary nature of the book and the choice of text statistics as the problem domain. Corres book will thus be very useful to those who need a very elementary introduction to ICON. Those with significant programming experience who want to learn about the distinctive features of ICON or who want to study more sophisticated examples oftext manipulation and analysis should proceed directly to Ralph E. Gnswold & Madge T. Griswold's The ¡CON programming language (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1983). which also serves as the reference manual for the language. [William J. Poser, Stanford University.] Schriftsystem und Orthographic Ed. by Peter Eisenberg and Hartmut Günther. (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik, 97.) Tübingen: Niemeyer , 1989. Pp. x, 356. DM 1 18.00. This collection of fifteen articles on writing systems and orthography mainly concentrates on German. Five contributions deal with the connection between linguistic units in spoken and written speech. Manfred Kohrt (179-227) analyzes the 'h' in German orthography that is also called 'syllable-separating' and 'lengthening ' —erroneous and misleading names, according to Korth. Gerhard Augst (1-9) first describes the rules for graphemic characterization of vowel lengthening in German and then makes suggestions on how to eliminate exceptions in loanwords. Utz Maas (229-49) writes about the orthographic system to denote vowel length from the perspective of learners with various dialectal backgrounds. Peter Eisenberg (57-84) shows that there are significant differences between syllable structures in written and spoken German, and Werner Hofrichter (163-77) describes rules for the division of written words (at the end of a line). Two contributions use psycholinguistic techniques . The paper by Michael Bock, Klaus Hagenscheider, & Alfred Schweer (23-55) deals with German capitalization. It can be shown that readers profit from capitalization when reading a text, so that noun capitalization in German seems to have a useful function. Stefan Gfoerer, Hartmut Günther, & Michael Bock ( 1 1 1-35) studied eye-movement patterns of Dutch subjects with a good knowledge of German as they read Dutch texts printed with German-like capitalization. The results showed a facilitation effect: fixation durations were shorter. Two papers are on phenomena of written language . Ulrike Behrens (11-22) analyzes punctuation rules with regard to their syntactic contents, and Peter Gallmann's contribution (85-110) deals with the syngraphemes hyphen and apostrophe. Gallmann first proposes orthographic principles and then defines several subclasses . One contribution deals with writing systems other than German: Trudel Meisenburg (25265 ) compares Romance writing systems, arguing that the differences between the French and Spanish writing systems result from differing phonetic evolution after fixation of the writing system. Finally, there are five general papers. Roland Harweg (137-62) discusses writing systems with regard to their connotative functions . The focus is on the problem of specifying (or isolating) a language via a writing system and the concomitant linguistic identity of (literate ) speakers ofthat language. Dieter Nerius (267-96) reviews specific features of orthography —the codification of written language, its obligatory character, variability, and conditions of change. Principles of orthography are also discussed by Ilse Rahnenfuhrer (283-96), who investigates whether these principles are language-universal or language-specific. Using ordinary language philosophy as a starting point. Christian Stetter (297-320) sketches some basic concepts of an analytic theory of writing. The last paper, by Richard Wiese (321-39) (under a modularist view), assumes that rules for graphemic regularities apply only to lexically derived forms, whereas punctuation is constrained by syntax (or prosody). This collection shows that written language is not simply secondary to spoken language; rather, writing systems are part of the language system, interacting with other linguistic (sub)systems. The book also reflects certain problems in German orthography (and the concomitant public discussion) and suggests solutions to individual problems. The volume is less coherent than the editors assume in their foreword. Articles of interest to 650 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 3 (1991) a general linguistic...