A FUNCTIONAL-HIERARCHICAL MODEL OF THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN FRENCH ORTHOGRAPHY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/2663-6530.2026.50.18-25Keywords:
French orthography, grapheme, phonographic principle, semiography, morphography, logogram, syntactic marker, orthographic depthAbstract
The article develops a functional account of the principles that organize modern French orthography. The study is based on peer-reviewed Ukrainian- and English-language research published between 2020 and 2025 and on a separate set of normative sources used only for illustrative spellings. Rather than treating French spelling as a collection of irregular correspondences, the analysis distinguishes several interacting layers of graphic information. Phonographic encoding provides the basic relation between spoken and written forms, but its limited consistency is compensated for by semiographic mechanisms. Morphographic and syntactic spellings preserve lexical families and grammatical relations even when the relevant graphemes are silent, while logographic and differential spellings distinguish homophonous units and support rapid lexical identification. The historical-etymological component is interpreted as a stabilizing layer whose elements may remain diachronic residues or acquire new morphological and differentiating functions. Evidence from recent studies of French spelling acquisition supports this multi-level architecture: phonological, lexical-orthographic and morphological error patterns develop differently, and silent agreement markers require information that cannot be recovered from pronunciation alone. The article proposes a functional hierarchy in which no principle operates in isolation; their priorities shift according to the linguistic task. The resulting model explains orthographic depth as an emergent property of simultaneous phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical-semantic and historical coding and clarifies the systemic character of contemporary French spelling.
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