On the structure of written English words
James L. Dolby, Howard L. Resnikoff · Language · 1964
The purpose of this paper is to present the initial results of a study of certain regularities in the structure of written English words. Our objective will be to show that it is possible to extend the phonemic concepts of consonant, vowel, and syllable to written forms and that there is considerable utility in doing so. In particular, we shall show that a major proportion of the one-syllable words, graphemically defined, have the same part-of-speech assignments when checked against standard dictionaries. In this sense we shall claim that the one-syllable words form a part-of-speech class. We further conjecture that graphemic syllabification is intimately related to part-of-speech assignment in the set of all written English words.