Richard Sproat
List of John Benjamins publications for which Richard Sproat plays a role.
Book series
ISSN 1567-8202
Journal
Articles
2021 Statistical evidence for the Proto-Indo-European-Euskarian hypothesis: A word-list approach integrating phonotactics Diachronica 38:4, pp. 506–564 | Article
Based on a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, and regular sound correspondences between this Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo-European as standardly reconstructed, Blevins (2018) argues that Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo-European have a common ancestor that pre-dates the two proto-languages. Part of… read more
2018 Peter T. Daniels, 2018, An Exploration of Writing Written Language & Literacy 21:2, pp. 269–278 | Review
2017 A computational model of the discovery of writing Written Language & Literacy 20:2, pp. 194–226 | Article
This paper reports on a computational simulation of the evolution of early writing systems from pre-linguistic symbol systems, something for which there is poor evidence in the archaeological record. The simulation starts with a completely concept-based set of symbols, and then spreads those… read more
2013 A note on Unger’s “What linguistic units do Chinese characters represent?” Written Language & Literacy 16:1, pp. 107–111 | Article
Unger (2011) observes that Chinese characters do not observe a Zipfian distribution, and he uses this fact as evidence that Chinese characters do not represent words. He then goes on to suggest that they do not represent morphemes either. In this note I argue that Unger’s observation is neither… read more
2009 Review of Zhao & Baldauf (2008): Planning Chinese characters: Reaction, evolution or revolution The Role of Phonology in Reading, Penke, Martina (ed.), pp. 229–234 | Review
2009 Model for phonemic awareness in readers of Indian script Writing Systems and Linguistic Structure, Lee, Sang-Oak (ed.), pp. 161–169 | Article
Previous studies have shown that segmental awareness tasks are usually influenced by the script. In this paper, we extend these studies further to propose a more concrete, script-centric metric for evaluating phonemic awareness in readers of Indian scripts. We propose that the ease or difficulty… read more
2006 Brahmi-derived scripts, script layout, and segmental awareness Script Adjustment and Phonological Awareness, Neef, Martin and Guido Nottbusch (eds.), pp. 45–66 | Article
In earlier work (Sproat 2000), I characterized the layout of symbols in a script in terms of a calculus involving two dimensional catenation operators: I claimed that leftwards, rightwards, upwards, downwards and surrounding catenation are sufficient to describe the layout of any script. In the… read more
1998 Review of Daniels & Bright (1996): The world's writing systems Written Language & Literacy 1:1, pp. 129–137 | Review