University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations 5-1-2014 A New Paradigm for Punctuation Albert Edward Krahn University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Linguistics Commons, and the Modern Languages Commons Recommended Citation Krahn, Albert Edward, "A New Paradigm for Punctuation" (2014). Theses and Dissertations. 465. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/465 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A NEW PARADIGM FOR PUNCTUATION by Albert E. Krahn A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee May 2014 ABSTRACT A NEW PARADIGM FOR PUNCTUATION by Albert E. Krahn The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2014 Under the Supervision of Professor Fred R. Eckman This is a comprehensive study of punctuation, particularly the uses to which it has been put as writing developed over the centuries and as it gradually evolved from an aid to oral delivery to its use in texts that were read silently. The sudden need for standardization of punctuation which occurred with the start of printing spawned some small amount of interest in determining its purpose, but most works after printing began were devoted mainly to helping people use punctuation rather than try to discover why it was being used. Gradually, two main views on its purpose developed: it was being used for rhetorical purposes or it was needed to reveal the grammar in writing. These views are still somewhat in place. ii The community of linguists took little notice of writing until the last few centuries and even less notice of punctuation. The result was that few studies were done on the underlying purpose for punctuation until the twentieth century, and even those were few and far between, most of them occurring only in the last thirty years. This study argues that neither rhetoric nor grammar is directly the basis for punctuation. Rather, it responds to a schema that determines the order of the words in spoken and written English, and it is a linguistic concept without question. The special uses of the features of punctuation are discussed, as well as some anomalies in its use, some ideas for more studies, and some ideas for improving the teaching of punctuation. iii © Copyright by Albert E. Krahn, 2014 All Rights Reserved iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1 Introduction 1.1 The Purpose of the Study ...............................................1 1.2 Definitions in Textbooks and Handbooks ....................5 1.3 Punctuation in Reference Works ..................................8 1.4 Some Scholarly Approaches to Punctuation ...............10 1.5 Defining Language .......................................................16 1.6 Defining Writing .........................................................16 1.7 The Symbols found in Writing .....................................20 1.8 Summary .......................................................................23 2 The Evolution of Punctuation 2.1 Introduction ..................................................................24 2.2 The Earliest Punctuation ..............................................25 2.3 Writing as a Technology ................................................26 2.4 Problems with Terminology .........................................27 2.5 The Genre Confusion ....................................................33 2.6 Characteristics of the Evolution ..................................34 2.7 The Greek Punctuation ................................................35 2.8 Punctuation and the Roman Empire ...........................38 2.9 The Glory of Roman Punctuation ................................41 2.10 The Empire after the Fall .............................................45 2.11 A Small Change with a Big Effect ...............................47 2.12 The Early Middle Ages .................................................48 2.13 The Role of Important Individuals in the Middle Ages ................................................................................52 2.14 The Ninth Century Turnaround ...................................54 2.15 The Great Division ........................................................57 2.16 The Humanists of the Fourteenth Century .................58 2.17 The Modes of Medieval Punctuation ...........................59 2.18 The Impact of Printing on Punctuation ......................61 2.19 Syntax vs. Rhetoric: The Theoretical Argument ........63 2.20 Punctuation in Concert with Music ............................67 2.21 The Triumph of Technology ........................................69 2.22 Conclusion ....................................................................74 v 3 Punctuation Scholarship in the Twentieth Century 3.1 Introduction ..................................................................75 3.2 A Century of Little Progress ........................................76 3.3 Published Works on Punctuation in the 1900s and early 2000 3.3.1 Husband, Punctuation: Its Principles and Practices .....................................................77 3.3.2 Summey, Modern Punctuation .........................81 3.3.3 Summey, American Punctuation ......................84 3.3.4, Meyer, A Linguistic Study of American Punctuation .......................................................87 3.3.5 Nunberg, The Linguistics of Punctuation ........89 3.3.6 Patt, Punctuation as a Means of Medium-Dependent Presentation Structure in English...........................................................92 3.4 Books Which Contain Some Linguistic Value 3.4.1 Treip, Milton’s Punctuation and Changing English Usage, 1582-1676 ..............95 3.4.2 Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse ..........95 3.4.3 Graham-White, Punctuation and Its Dramatic Value inShakespearean Drama .......95 3.4.5 Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading ..........................95 3.5 Dissertations Having a Linguistic Approach to Punctuation 3.5.1 Steegar, Prosody and Punctuation: A Linguistic Approach .......................................96 3.5.2 Levinson, Punctuation and the Orthographic Sentence: A Linguistic Analysis ........................97 3.5.3 Waller, The typographic contribution to language: towards a model of typographic genres and their underlying structures ...........97 3.5.4 Hill, A comma in parsing: a study into the influence of punctuation (commas) on contextually isolated “garden-path” sentences ...................................97 vi 3.5.5 Jones, What’s the point? A (computational) theory of punctuation .......................................98 3.5.6 Say, An information-based approach to punctuation ..................................................98 3.5.7 Doran, Incorporating punctuation into the sentence grammar: a lexicalized tree adjoining grammar perspective ...............98 3.5.8 Vial, Take pause: musical punctuation in the eighteenth century ..................................99 3.5.9 Grindlay, Missing the point: the effect of punctuation on reading performance ........99 3.5.10 Schou, The problem of English punctuation ...99 3.5.11 Arriola-Nickell, Punctuation as symbol: experiencing archetypal patterns through personal narrative ...........................................100 3.6 Conclusion ..................................................................100 Chapter 4 The New Paradigm for Punctuation 4.1 Introduction: Content and Form ...............................102 4.2 Hypotheses for Form ..................................................103 4.3 The Sentence ..............................................................104 4.4 The Sentence by Parts ...............................................108 4.5 The Parsing Process ...................................................110 4.6 Sentences without Meaning ......................................115 4.7 The Schema ................................................................116 4.8 Yaggy and the Canonical Sentence ..........................121 4.9 The New Paradigm ....................................................123 4.10 English Writing as a Graphic ...................................124 4.11 Gestalt and the Text ...................................................130 4.12 Locating Punctuation ................................................136 4.13 The Sample Paragraph with Punctuation ...............139 4.14 The Sample Paragraph without Punctuation ..........139 4.15 The Importance of Space ...........................................140 4.16 Putting Spaces back into the Sample Paragraph ....145 4.17 Phonological Punctuation ..........................................147 4.18 Morphological Punctuation .......................................147 4.19 The Sample Paragraph with only Phonological and Morphological Punctuation now added ............ 149 4.20 Static Attention Devices ............................................149 4.21 Punctuation and Markedness ...................................150 vii 4.22 Phonemes and Graphemes..........................................157 4.23 Punctuating the Dynamic Axis: The Comma.............160 4.24 The Role of Interpolations...........................................169 4.25 The Role of Adjuncts....................................................170