PUNCTUATION AND THE ORTHOGRAPHIC SENTENCE: A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS (HISTORY MIDDLE ENGLISH).
Item
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Title
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PUNCTUATION AND THE ORTHOGRAPHIC SENTENCE: A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS (HISTORY MIDDLE ENGLISH).
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Identifier
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AAI8601668
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identifier
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8601668
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Creator
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LEVINSON, JOAN PERSILY.
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Contributor
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Terence (Terry) Langendoen
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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The linguistic study of English punctuation, in general a neglected field in twentieth-century linguistics, suffers from two sets of disadvantages. On the one hand, the uses of the past are poorly researched and fundamentally misunderstood, applying unexamined constructs from a later age to an earlier world intellectually and technologically different. On the other hand, contemporary work flounders on untested assumptions, two in particular that are linguistically crucial. One is that punctuation marks syntax; the other is that the fundamental syntactic entity which determines punctuation is the "sentence." Thus the first part of this dissertation corrects the unreliable research on early punctuation through a firsthand examination of manuscripts and texts, demonstrating that the signs that demarcated the "sentence" did not exist at least up till 1500, that the sentence as a unit of writing was not developed until well after the spread of printing, and that the tradition of analyzing punctuation in terms of syntactic categories arose not because these were the appropriate categories but because they were the only ones at hand. The second part of the research emerges from the reassessment of past practices, but is synchronically independent. It argues that the orthographic sentence cannot be accounted for by the grammar and introduces the concept of the "informational grouping" to account for the placement of sentence boundaries. The additional contributions of the syntax and prosody of English are incorporated into this approach. Sentence-internal punctuation is also reanalyzed in this light, and two basic categories are distinguished, obligatory and optional, and an initial taxonomy of obligatory punctuation is presented.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
