Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Welcome

University of Bielefeld

Department of English

M.Ed. British and American Studies

Lecture: “Introduction to Linguistics”

BM 2: Introduction to English Linguistics

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Dafydd Gibbon

Contact: gibbon@uni-bielefeld.de

Thursday: 8.00- 10.00, H 4

Winter term 2006/ 2007


Welcome to Melanie Zahn’s Web log
“Introduction to Linguistics”

Web Portfolio by: Melanie Zahn

-----------------Registration Number: 1666313

----------------Contact: Melanze@web.de







Please Note: On a web log, the entries of a learner’s portfolio emerge in an inverse order. This means that the latest entries are to be found at the beginning of this portfolio, whereas the oldest entries emerge at the bottom of the web page. In order to have full access to all entries, please consult the ARCHIVES from October to January, because not every entry will be shown on the “Current Posts” site.

If you want to consult my Web log “How to Make a Dictionary”, please click on my profile and use the link called “How to Make a Dictionary” :-)


Sources

Internet Sources:

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/Classes/Classes2006WS/IntroductionToLinguistics/

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/mmas/

www.wikipedia.com

http://www.etymonline.com/

http://dict.leo.org/

Introduction to Linguistics, Session 12, Thursday 2007-01-12

Interdisciplinary aspects:

Text Technology

Linguistics an other disciplines

The Background to this Web Portfolio

Motivation of a Web Portfolio

As already mentioned at the beginning of this portfolio (cf. session 1) a web portfolio provides easier access to the information given in class and makes an interaction via internet possible.

It is also a means of becoming familiar with the use of everyday’s (electronic) media.

It is a form of “Applied Text Linguistics” that has been a subordinate topic within this “Introduction to Linguistics” class.

A web portfolio is a general source of (class) material and enables the students to exchange ideas and tasks more easily.

A web portfolio does not have to be uploaded onto a homepage, a blog (web log) like the one you are having access to now is also a very practical way of publishing information.


The creation of a portfolio web site

A learner’s portfolio should contain the main information, material and tasks discussed in class. It should illustrate the teaching goals and provide an easy access to the necessary information.

Web sites can be structured in various ways. In fact, their structure depends on the interest and the focus of the web site author/ creator.

Entries can thus be structured according to the author’s preferences. It has to be constructed with web editing software and has to be professionally formatted in order to look good, well structured and to be easy to use.

A web log (blog) is generally structured in inverse order, because the first entries will later emerge at the bottom of the page or in another folder that is called “Archive” or “Previous Posts”. But this inverse order will not cause to much of a problem.



How to run a website

There are several ways to make web site.

- You can run your own web server on a DSL line and save your HTML files

- You can use the university web site and upload you HTML files there

- You can use any other web service provider and upload your files there

- You can use a blogging software and create your own weblog, like the one you are facing now J

When you want to use a blog, there are many different providers that you can use. Some addresses would be:

www.blog.de or www.blogger.com


Revision: What is a website again and what is a hypertext?

A web site is a hypertext document with embedded document objects. These documents are linked to other text, image- or table objects within the web page/ blog and to external web sites.
A text on a web site/ web log is therefore a hypertext either with conventional hierarchical parts or as a complex network of parts.

A hypertext is any text document published on the World Wide Web. It is found in electronic dictionaries, on blogs (like this) and e- commerce sites. The search engine GOOGLE is one of the most widely connected web sites.


Revision: What is a text again?

A text comprehends a lot of properties, but its main properties consist of the keywords: appearance, meaning and structure!


APPLYING TEXT THEORY PROFESIONALLY

The Text “What a Linguist Needs to Know about Word Processing” is a very useful instruction written by Prof. Gibbon. It illustrates very well how to work professionally on word documents.

The entire text can be found on the following link:

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/Docs/LinguistcsAndWordProcessing03.pdf:

___________________________________________________________________________

E-MELD Consultant's Report 2004

What a Linguist Needs to Know about Word Processing

or: Don't hack it - design it!

Dafydd Gibbon

Universität Bielefeld, 2004-10-01 (V03 - draft, comments welcome)

1. Objective

This report explains why and how to use stylesheets in word processing, from a linguistic

perspective. The present document is used as a model.

2. Motivation

Many users of word processors are unfamiliar with the advantages of using well-defined

styles for document objects like titles, headings, paragraphs of specific types, which have

the same consistently defined rendering properties (font, spacing, centring, indentation

etc.) wherever they occur in a document. A common practice is to assign rendering

properties of this kind to each local occurrence of a document object separately: a stretch

of text is marked, and instantly formatted. For short documents this is a handy, "quick and

dirty" procedure. For long and complex documents it leads to waste of time, patience and

energy (and of course the personal satisfaction of having produced a professionally

formatted document is missed!).

The advantages of using styles are:

1. Time saving: if the rendering properties have to be changed for each individual

occurrence of a document object such as a heading, this is unnecessary time-wasting -

change a style once to change all occurrences of this style at the same time.

2. Consistency preserving: if the rendering properties are changed separately by hand,

inevitably errors occur, leading to inconsistency of formatting.

3. Consistent cross-media conversion: well-defined styles in one formatting system, such

as a word-processor, can be converted consistently into well-defined styles in another,

such as the world-wide web.

4. Consistent cross system conversion: with well-defined styles, there is a much greater

chance of comparable results when different word processors or different versions of a

word processor are used.

5. Support of barrier free access: screen readers for the visually impaired can process

styles intelligently and produce well-structured output.

Some examples:

wherever headings of the same level occur, they are expected to look the same, so why

not assign the format once and for all;

wherever text paragraphs occur, they are expected to look the same as the others of

the same type;

wherever bibliographical entry paragraphs occur, they are expected to look the same as

the others of the same type, and so on;

wherever indentations occur, they should be of the same size;

wherever spaces before and after paragraphs occur, they should be consistent, and

also freely variable.

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In each of these cases, why not assign these properties once and for all, rather than

separately, each of the many times that they occur in a document? If well-defined styles

are not used, none of these advantages can be used.

3. A linguistic perspective on document production

Ordinary word processing - as used in linguistic articles and reports (including this one) -

from the applied linguistic perspective of text generation, not from the naive vantage point

of writing with a computer. The idea is that linguists should not march from phonemes

through morphemes and words to sentences and stop there, but should regard texts as

systematic language objects which are worthy of their systematic attention, and apply this

knowledge professionally in their own writing. These language objects are made of

document objects with semantic properties and media properties, just like other language

objects with semantic properties and media properties (e.g. phonetic interpretations), can

be described with a document grammar, and receive text-structural descriptions, for

example as tree-diagrams. Essentially, then, the report is about practical aspects of styles

and stylesheets from the applied linguistic point of view.

The moral of the story is that if linguists (particularly linguists concerned with language

documentation, corpus tagging, XML markup and the like) do not use these objects and

their properties intelligently in generating their own texts with a word processor ... well,

maybe the moral should not be made too explicit, after all. This document, by the way, was

composed using these techniques with OpenOffice (version 1.1.), and will be distributed

both in the OpenOffice writer format (sxw; compressed XML) and in OpenOffice-generated

PDF format, following the open source, open archive philosophy (see also

http://www.openoffice.org).

4. Applications of linguistics in word processing

Evidently, words are within the purview of linguistics, and it is not surprising that linguistics

is heavily involved in the development of word processors like OpenOffice or MS-Word. A

moment's reflection will show that the following properties of words, dealt with by modern

word processors, are actually the domain of linguists, which is why linguists are employed

by software companies to solve issues concerning such properties:

Spelling (cf. spell checkers).

Correct inflection (cf. grammar checkers).

Thesaurus as a writer's help.

Word completion facility.

Capitalisation facility.

Use of correct quotation marks.

Translation of terms for localisation to other languages.

There are also many add-ons to word processors concerned with functionalities such as

the reading aloud of selected text portions, translation of selected text portions, which

involve the results of many years of research in linguistics, phonetics, speech technology

and text technology. There are, of course, imperfections in each of these applications:

nobody is perfect, no theory is complete, and neither are paper dictionaries and

grammars.

5. Beyond word processing: documents and document objects

The term "word processing" is something of a misnomer. No user of a word processor

presumably just wants to write words. The goal is usually to write a document, consisting

of sections, consisting of different paragraph types such as headings, and text, each

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paragraph consisting of lines, and each line composed of a stream of characters. Note that

this account has nothing to say about linguistic units such as words and sentences. In fact,

this is the level of Applied Text Linguistics, in which texts are dealt with in much the same

way as sentences are dealt with in more conventional linguistics.

The objects dealt with in Applied Text Linguistics are, among others, those just introduced.

For convenience of reference they will be called DocumentObjects. There are many kinds

of Document Object, but the main Document Objects handled by word processors are:

1. document,

2. page

3. paragraph,

4. character,

5. list (enumerating list or bullet list),

6. table.

The basic Document Objects are document, page, paragraph and character; the other two

types are more specialised.

6. Document objects and their properties

Objects of all kinds have specific collections of properties, and Document Objects are no

exception. The properties which Document Objects have are of two main types:

1. structural properties, which define the components of the Document Object and the

contexts into which it fits (e.g. for paragraph objects: what the next paragraph object

should be),

2. interpretative properties, which define what meaning, i.e. content a Document Object

has (this is entirely up to the author and the readers, of course) and what rendering

style a Document Object has (i.e. what its appearance will be).

The relation between document structure on the one hand, and its two interpretations as

content and rendering on the other, are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Text linguistic view of Document structure,

Content and Rendering.

The properties are typically organised as attributes, i.e. collections of mutually exclusive

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properties, which are referred to as the values of the attributes. For example, a paragraph

Document Object cannot be both centred and left-aligned at the same time, and a

character Document Object cannot be both 12pt and 10pt, or italic and plain at the same

time. Some Document Object definitions are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Document Objects and some of their properties

Document Objects Attribute Typical values

Document Name relevant metadata

Author relevant metadata

Version relevant metadata

Page Size sub-attributes: size, top, bottom, left, right

margins, header, footer, frame, ...

Margin sub-attributes: top, bottom, left, right margin

Header special page-linked paragraph type

Footer special page-linked paragraph type

Paragraph Alignment left, right, centred, justified

Numbering enumerated, bulleted

Tabulator horizontal tab settings

Indentation left & right margin, first line indentation

Spacing gap above and below

Line 1, 1.5, 2, ...

Frame sub-attributes: line type, thickness, colour, ...

Character Font Arial, Helvetica, Times Roman, Courier, ...

Size 10pt, 12pt, ...

Bold bold, non-bold

Italic italit, non-italic

Underline underline, non-underline

Colour red, orange, ... white, black

Note that the four Document Objects in Table 1 are not in a fixed hierarchy, but in a partial

order: pages do not necessarily correspond to paragraphs, and paragraphs do not

necessarily correspond to pages. Pages and paragraphs belong to two orthogonal -

independent - levels of organisation. Documents consist of paragraphs, and paragraphs

consist of characters. But simultaneously, documents consist of pages, and pages consist

of columns (one, two or more). The difference can easily be characterised:

1. The paragraph is a part of document structure, which organises and structures the

meanings intended by the author. The paragraph also has rendering properties, which

reflect the intentions of the author with respect to the paragraph's status as title,

heading, subheading, etc., and of course content properties.

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2. The page has no significance with respect to the intentions of the author (in general;

bibliophile books are the exception which proves the rule), but reflects production

contraints determined by the publisher.

7. Styles

The definitions of rendering properties for Document Objects are known as styles, and a

set of such styles for a document is known as a stylesheet. Stylesheets are generally

provided by publishers for books, scientific articles, and so on, and traditionally are printed

on paper, with examples. However, in electronically based publishing the stylesheets are

simply the definitions of Document Objects in a word processor. Using the formatting

facility of the word processor, a set of styles can be defined and assigned to an entire

document stylesheet. For OpenOffice, this is can be stored as a template file with the

conventional ".stw" ending (rather than ".sxw"), and in MS-Word as a template file with the

".dot" ending (rather than ".doc").

8. Special paragraph object types

The concept of paragraph object used in word processors is very general, and many

different subtypes of paragraph object can be defined. The subtypes inherit the basic

rendering properties defined for the standard paragraph type; these properties may be

overridden by the specific properties needed for the paragraph subtype. The paragraph

subtypes used in the present document are:

1. Pre-Title (user-defined)

2. Title (predefined but modified),

3. Subtitle (predefined but modified),

4. Author (user-defined),

5. Version (user-defined),

6. Heading 1 (i.e. level 1, not the first heading; predefined but modified),

7. Text body (predefined but modified),

8. Footnote (predefined but modified).

Clearly, in all but plain typewriter rendering style such as those used in the body of plain

emails, no distinction in terms of rendering properties occurs. However, in the context of a

word processor, rendering differences can easily be defined. Some paragraph subtypes

are predefined by the word processor, as indicated in the list. Many other paragraph

subtypes are typically required in a long and complex document and can be defined by the

author. Very useful examples of predefined styles are the paragraphs in a table of

contents, which point to page numbers of sections, bibliographical references, or the

paragraphs in a bibliography which contain the individual bibliographical entries.

Note that if the correct heading levels are used, a table of contents can be constructed

automatically, and satisfactory renderings in other media, e.g. the web, can be achieved.

The styles are assigned to segments of text by means of markup codes; the most familiar

rkup code system is HTML, the markup language used for web documents.

9. Are you a word processor hacker?

If you do any of the following, as a linguist you should be ashamed of yourself...

1. To create a space between paragraphs you insert an empty line (actually an empty

paragraph object consisting of one line). DON'T DO THIS: define the space before and

after the paragraph type which suits your needs. WHY? Preceding and trailing spaces

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are properties of paragraphs and should be defined in the style for the relevant

paragraph type. If you just use an empty paragraph (i.e. type the return key) you are

committed to a fixed spacing; if you define the spacing for each paragraph separately,

you run the risk of inconsistencies and waste time; if you define a style, you will avoid

these problems.

2. To create a table you use spaces and tab separators, and draw the table using separate

graphical lines over the text. DON'T DO THIS: create a table object, and assign frame

properties to it. WHY? Spaces and tab separators may be defined differently on

different machines even with the same word processor, and the table will consequently

look a mess. A table rendered in this way is extremely hard to edit, and will not export

consistently into another medium. A table object, with properly defined styles for cells,

rows, columns and framing is quick to construct, easy to edit, and exports consistently.

3. To create a list, you write numbers at the left of a new paragraph. DON'T DO THIS: use

a list object, either with enumeration (pick the numbering style) or with bullets (pick the

bullet style). Why? If the list style does not suit you (e.g. the wrong kind of indentation is

used), you can edit the style once for all and stop worrying. If the bullet points do not

suit you, replace them in the style with other symbols, and the same applies.

4. To create a heading, you mark the line (actually the paragraph) and directly assign

centring, font size, etc. to the marked section. DON'T DO THIS: define the rendering

style properties for the Document Object. WHY? This is a common, but really not so

clever practice, which is a real time-waster and inconsistency-causer: imagine that an

editor requires the headings to be changed to a different font, font size, or highlight

convention, and imagine how long this would take for an article or a book if each

heading were changed separately. Not only that, imagine the potential for errors and

inconsistencies. If you change the style, you change it once, and all headings of the

same type change automatically.

5. To change the numbering of a heading or subheading, you add the number by hand to

each heading individually. DON'T DO THIS: add a numbering property to the heading

style once, and all headings will change automatically. This ensures automatic

numbering which is both consistently counted and consistently formatted.

10. Document structure

The structure of a given document can be described using a tree-graph derived from a

document grammar, just like the structure of a sentence. The structure of the present

document, for example, is illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Document structure for the present document (simplified).

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For example, a document may consist of front matter, a main text, and back matter. The

front matter will include title, author, version (e.g. date, edition, table of contents, etc.), and

in the case of a book an be very complex. The main text may consist of chapters, sections,

subsections, subsubsections and so on, which in turn consist of Text Objects such as

paragraphs, lists (in turn consisting of list elements), tables and so on. The back matter

may consist of endnotes, bibliography and index. A linguist will not find it hard to write a

grammar of this kind on the lines of the grammars used for the description of sentences of

a language. Further details will be given below.

11. How to ...

The following instructions pertain to OpenOffice but can be transferred easily to the

corresonding menu functions in commercial word processors. Only the basic features of

style definition are dealt with.

1. Designing the text structure and the rendering:

1. Draw up a list of the paragraph Document Object types (such as Title, Heading 1,

Heading 2, etc.) which you need (see the list given above for the present document).

2. Construct a table with 3 columns (for Document Objects, attributes and values).

3. Enter each of these paragraph Document Objects in the leftmost column (cf. the

table given above).

4. Enter the attributes required for each object, and modify the default paragraph level

values which these attributes should receive (e.g. spaces, justification, numbering,

line centring).

5. Also enter the attributes which all character objects in this paragraph type should

receive by default, and modify the default values accordingly (e.g. font, size, italic,

colour).

6. This table is your stylesheet.

2. Implementing the rendering:

1. Open a new text document.

2. In one of the text fields in the function bar, the style field should appear. In a new

document, this style entry is likely to be called "Standard", "Normal", etc. Click on the

select button attached to this field, and very likely you will only see this style listed.

3. Navigate the menu space via the "Format" menu point, then "Styles", then

"Catalogue".

4. A long list of pre-defined styles will appear.

5. In the lower left text field select "All Styles" instead of "Automatic", and even more

styles will appear.

6. Check this list for styles in your list; stick to the names for standard predefined styles

where possible.

7. Click on any style name, and a dialogue box with around 12 tabs at the top

willappear. Each tab groups related attributes together.

8. The default values of the attributes can then be modified according to your

stylesheet.

9. If no suitable style is defined in your list, define a "New" style: the dialogue box with

the 12 or so tabs will appear, first of all requesting a name for the file, the name of

another style to switch to when the "Return/Enter" key is pressed, and a basic style

from which the new style inherits its defult properties.

10.The default values of the attributes can then be modified according to your

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stylesheet.

11.Note that no explicit distinction is made in this dialogue box between tabs for

paragraph, line and charater properties. The distinction is rather obvious, but it will be

useful to list the tabs pertaining to each type of Document Object.

12.Commercial word processors use similar techniques for style definition; the

appearance of the menu points and dialogue boxes is very different, of course.

3. Test your style definitions by writing a short document containing

1. the styles you have modified or defined, such as

1. Title

2. Heading 1 (i.e. top level heading)

3. Heading 2 (i.e. next level subheading)

4. Text body

2. and additional Document Objects such as lists and tables, with their styles defined

appropriately.

3. Check the styles used in this report.

When you have done this, you will have

1. designed a text document on linguistic principles, and in particular

2. defined a stylesheet in the form of an object-attribute-value table containing a set of

styles relevant to your document.

3. implemented the stylesheet using a word processor,

4. tested the implementation in the production of a document.

12. A practical example: the present document

Figure 2 shows a reproduction of the first page of an earlier version of the present

document as a sequence of document objects, along with a stylised version of the

Document Objects and the names of the rendering styles assigned to them.

Figure 2: Document objects on p. 1 of an earlier version of the present document.

The page object itself is not labelled; it has upper, lower, left and right margin attributes, as

well as a footer attribute. The stylised version of the document object shows the bounding

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boxes which show the rendered size of the document objects, determined by:

1. the size of the objects it contains (e.g. for a paragraph object, the number of lines it

contains and their spacing),

2. its own size rendering attributes (e.g. for a paragraph object, its left, right, upper and

lower margins).

The rendering attributes assigned to each style obtain their values by inheriting them from

a default style, in this case called "Standard", unless they are specifically modified to suit

the special requirements of the document object concerned. For instance, the "Title" object

contains paragraphs with modified upper and lower spacing, which contain characters with

modified values for size (16pt) and highlighting (bold) attributes. See Table 2.

Table 2: Main rendering attributes and values of objects in the present document

Style Inherited from Paragraph attributes Character attributes

Standard: default Left indentation: 0.00cm

Right indentation: 0.00cm

First line indentation: 0.00cm

Upper spacing: 0.00cm

Lower spacing: 0.00cm

Left justified

Arial standard 12pt

Pre-title: Standard Upper spacing: 0.40cm

Lower spacing: 0.40cm

Centred

Italic

Title: Standard Upper spacing: 0.40cm

Lower spacing: 0.40cm

Centred

Bold 14pt

Subtitle: Standard Upper spacing: 0.40cm

Lower spacing: 0.40cm

Centred

Italic

Author: Standard Upper spacing: 0.20cm

Lower spacing: 0.20cm

Centred

Version: Standard Centred

Heading1: Standard Outline numbered

Upper spacing: 0.40cm

Lower spacing: 0.20cm

TextBody: Standard Upper spacing: 0.07cm

Lower spacing: 0.07cm

Numbered list: Standard Numbering

Unnumbered list: Standard Bulleted

Footer: Standard Centred 10pt

Field macros: Footer

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13. A simple grammar for the present document

The following phrase-structure grammar describes the arrangement of document objects

on the first page of the current documents. In order to complete the grammar for the whole

document, table and figure objects need to be added.

DOCUMENT → FRONT-MATTER DOCUMENT-BODY

FRONT-MATTER → Pre-Title Title Subtitle Author Version

TEXT-BODY → SECTION SECTION*

SECTION → Heading1 TEXT

TEXT → TextBody | NumberedList | UnnumberedList

There is a clear analogy to standard phrase structure /constituent structure, context-free)

grammars for sentence syntax of the "S → NP VP" type. In the notation used here, the

arrow "→" can be read as "consists of", the space between the categories on the righthand

side of the arrow as "followed by", the asterisk "*" as "none or arbitrarily many", and

the vertical bar "|" can be read as "or" (here the exclusive or).

The notation used in different document description contexts varies in detail, but all

notations employ some means of indicating hierarchical or immediate dominance

structures meaning "consists of", alternatives, and sequence or linear precedence.

14. Summary

The main point to be made is that a document has a text linguistic tructure which is

comparable with sentence structure in conventional linguistics, and that these receive a

rendering interpretation which is comparable with phonetic interpretation in conventional

linguistics. These structural levels have much in common:

In semiotic terms, both documents and sentences are complex signs, which can be

thought of as abstract or mental units, which are interpreted in terms of reality at two

levels, i.e. as meaning and form,

paradigmatically, the constituent objects and their properties are organised into an

inheritance hierarchy, the most common kind in conventional linguistics being a type

hierarchy, the most common kind in word processor text linguistics being a default

hierarchy,

syntagmatically, the constituent objects are organised into a compositional hierarchy,

rather like the constituents of a word or a sentence,

The same formalisms can be used for describing the structure, the meaning and the

form properties of constituent objects, for example context-free grammars, or as

attribute-value structures and inheritance hierarchies.

The constraints on text structure are of course different in detail from constraints on

sentence structure, just as constraints on sentence structure are different from constraints

on word structure. For the syntagmastic hierarchy, typically document grammars are

defined in order to permit electronic analysis and display of documents; in the XML

document markup framework, grammars are expressed as Document Type Descriptions

(DTSs) or XML Schemata.

Topics of this kind are dealt with in the discipline of Text Technology and a number of

related disciplines, including Computational Linguistics and Eoftware Engineering. The

most widespread kind of approach goes under the heading of XML technologies, which

comprise conventions for document grammars and tools for creating, checking and

presenting documents systematically, and are gradually being adopted as a standard for

the creation and rendering of internet documents. Of particular interest for the humanities

is the use of these techniques to classify, archive and search documents systematically,

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and in this area text technology is closely related to library and archive sciences. The Text

Encoding Initiative (TEI) is perhaps the most well-known approach to document

description using these technologies. These technologies are not bibliographically

documented here because the standard references can be found on the internet by

straightforward keyword searching, and in any case are often internet documents

themselves.

It should be emphasised that there are many more dimensions to document production

than those described here. The focus of attention in the present document was on the

classic written paper. Many more rendering techniques are available, of course, including

rendering as a hypertext (in graphical or text browsers), rendering by reading aloud with a

speech synthesis application for blind users or users in visually adverse environments.

15. Conclusion

The moral of this story is that you, as a linguist should, design documents in a linguistically

motivated fashion, practising what you preach, and bearing in mind how document

structure relates to both your content and to the appropriate rendering style for each

Document Object and its content. By doing this you will

save time,

be consistent,

ensure the same appearance in different word processors and on different platforms,

support barrier-free document access in assistive technologies for the disabled.

For short, informal documents of temporary relevance, a quick and dirty solution with no

well-defined Document Objects, and using local format assignment of paragraph and

character properties may be fine. For long or complex documents, advantage should be

taken of style definitions.

And of course you do not have to be a linguist to understandthese points or produce

professional stylesheet-based documents.

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___________________________________________________________________________


The reading of this text can be highly recommended, because a linguist needs to know about:

- text construction

- spelling (spell checkers)

- correct inflection (grammar checkers)

- how to use a thesaurus as writer’s help

- word prediction/ completion (also mobile phones)

- capitalisation

- use of correct quotation marks

- translation of terms for location to other languages


In this context, knowledge on Word Processing is very important, because Word processing with OpenOffice or MS-Word is an area of APPLIED LINGUISTICS.

Most people do not know how to format texts professionally, they only concentrate on the appearance of the text an forget about possible problems in converting and layout changes.



TEXT OBJECTS AND DOCUMENT OBJECTS

Formulation is all about text structure:

-----------------------DOCUMENT

------- --------------

FRONT MATTER TEXT BODY

------- -------- ----- ------------- ------

Title Subtitle Author Version Section Section Section

--------- ---- ------ ---- ------

heading text heading text heading text


Word processor text object hierarchy:

- Character:

- Properties: font, size, highlights

- Paragraph:

- Properties: upper, lower, left, right margins

- Types:

- Default

- Text body

- Headings (different levels of sub-headings)

- Lists: numbered lists (ordered lists), unordered lists (bullet lists)

- Tables

- Figure


Text objects and their properties:

CHARACTER

Font Arial, Helvetics, Times Roman, Courier, etc.

Size 10pt, 12pt, etc

Bold bold versus non-bold

Italic italic versus non-italic

Underline underline versus non-underline

Colour red, orange... black, white


PARAGRAPH

Alignment left, right, centred, justified

Numbering enumerated, bulleted

Tabulator horizontal tab settings

Indentation left and/ or right margin, first line indentation

Spacing gap above and below

Line 1, 1.5, 2,....

Frame sub-attributed: line type, thickness, colour,...


LISTS

Properties of lists:

- line spacing

- indenting

- spacing between list marker and text

Types: - ordered lists (numbered lists); properties: leading number

Example:

1. Apples

2. Oranges

3. Pears

4. Quinces

- unordered lists (bullet lists); properties: leading dot/ dash/ arrow/...

Examples:

- Apples

- Oranges

- Pears

- Quinces

TABLES

Word

POS

Phonology

Morphology

Definition

Text Corpus

























● Parts:

- Header rows (Properties: spacing, font, etc.)

- Contend rows (Properties: spacing, font, etc.)

- Columns (Properties: spacing, font, etc.)

- Cells (properties: padding, fonts, etc.)

● Properties: borders, etc.


FIGURES

● Parts:

- Picture

- Caption

- Cross-reference

● Advantages:

- Numbering is automatic

- Moving the picture changes the numbering

PARAGRAPHIC STYLES



Paragraphs: the professional method!

The UNPROFESSIONAL method is to “hack” paragraph objects!

For example: Their properties can simply be defined by using the “bold”, “centred” etc. properties. Only one paragraph is changed/ modified at a time then.

But this is definitely:

- a waste of time and energy, because all changes have to be made separately to each paragraph

- leads to inconsistency

- creates problems with converting into other media (e.g. hypertext for the internet)

Now: The professional method:

Types of paragraph objects should be defined as types, by means of styles (The German Formatvorlage).

This technique leads to:

- time-saving, because changes apply instantly to the whole document!

- Versatile

- Permits consistent formatting

- Permits easy conversion into other media


TYPICAL PARAGRAPH STYLES

- Default- Standard (predefined- the granddad of all styles)

- Pre-Title (user- defined)

- Title (predefined but modified)

- Subtitle (predefined but modified)

- Author (user- defined)

- Version (user-defined)

- Heading 1 (i.e. level 1, not the first heading; predefined but modified)

- Heading 2 (i.e. subheading of level 2, not the second heading; predefined but modified)

- Text body (predefined but modified)


STYLE FAMILIES: PROPERTY INHERITANCE

● Similar styles may “inherit” properties from more basic or general “parent” styles, which

they are “linked” to

● Default- do not use this- its the grandfather of all styles!

- Title

- Heading

- Heading 1

- Heading 2, etc.

- Text body

- Text body indented

- LongQuotation

- Bibliography


DOCUMENT OBJECTS: Superimposed Document Objects

● Document

- Filename

- Etc.

● Page

- Orientation: portrait, landscape

- Margins: top, bottom, left, right

● Running titles:

- Headers

- Footers

● Fields for insertion into running titles, etc.

- Page numbers

- Total number of pages

- Date


DOCUMENT OBJECTS AND THEIR PROPERTIES

Document Name relevant metadata

Author relevant metadata

Version relevant metadata

Page Size sub-attributes: size, top, bottom, left, right margins,

- header, footer, frame, etc.

Margin sub-attributes: size, top, bottom, left, right margins,

Header special page-linked paragraph type

Footer special page- linked paragraph type