Analysis of corrections of upper-case/lower-case initials in the Šolar and Lektor corpora

Abstract

The paper examines the role of orthographic norms in two types of non-authored text revision – text correction within the educational process and proofreading. Both the teacher and the proofreader intervene in the text in order to correct the deviations from the standard language norms: the teacher with the aim to develop the student's language (and stylistic) abilities, and the proofreader to ensure that the text complies with the standard language norms; in this paper the term correction is used for such interventions in the text. The specialized corpora Šolar and Lektor were used for the comparative analysis. As regards the corrections of upper-case/lower-case initials, there are 2,015 such corrections in the Šolar corpus where they represent a special category within spelling errors, while in the Lektor corpus there are 1,702 of those corrections and they are divided into six subtypes, which together overlap precisely with the category of upper-case and lower-case corrections in the Šolar corpus. They were used to create a typology of corrections from the Šolar corpus for the purposes of this paper. The aim of this paper is to present concrete spelling problems encountered by students and adult authors, and to examine how such errors are corrected by teachers and by proofreaders – whether they strictly adhere to codified orthographic norms, or whether deviations occur and in which cases. It was found that distinguishing between proper and common nouns causes the most problems. The paper represents a new approach in the study of language by connecting the field of developing students' language abilities and the field of proofreading.