At 11:47 PM 5/31/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Wanda may understand a difference in using a comma in the second sentence,
>but I suspect her readers will not. They will only see what appears to be a
>needless comma.
>akra

I disagree--and I'm very interested in this question.  I think the question
is rather what most writers would write than what most readers would
understand, though I doubt whether most readers would see anything wrong
with the second sentence.  But I bet that most writers would use a comma in
the second.  Moreover, most speakers would pause where the comma is in the
second sentence--and not where it isn't in the first.  I see the second
sentence as elliptical: isn't it really saying, "Mrs. VG has gone home; I
say so because her car is not in the parking lot"?  The comma marks the
place of missing thought, it seems to me.

>At 10:45 AM 5/21/99 +0000, Wanda wrote:
>>This will probably only add to the confusion, but I've found it very
>>useful in dealing with punctuating the "because" clauses.  If the
>>"because" clause gives a REASON, no comma is needed.  If the "because"
>>clause gives evidence (not reason), use a comma.
>>
>>      Mrs. VG has gone home because she became ill.
>>
>>      Mrs. VG has gone home, because her car is not in the parking lot.
>>In the "evidence" sentence, one can mentally insert "I know that" between
>>"home" and "because."  The comma takes the place of the "I know that."
>>
>>I've never seen it in a text (except my own!)--but it works!

And I have seen this in texts.  Just yesterday I noticed the following
sentence in my reading:

"The idea was not quite so demented as it may seem, because we were in the
habit of singing, as well as reading, of those enraptured beings who spend
their days in 'flinging down their golden crowns upon the jasper sea.'"
(Gosse, _Father and Son_ [1907], Chapter 5)

I think we don't see this construction in texts much because texts are
written, but the construction is a commonplace in speech.  In my view, it
is not used in writing often because it is needlessly complicated: two
thoughts that are quite distinct are crammed into one idea.  Keeping thems
eparate is simpler.  But nonetheless, we hear this construction all the
time, and we have to have a way to punctuate it, don't we?  Otherwise, we
imply that what follows the clause conjunction causes what preceeds it,
which is clearly not the case.

Another way of discussing this construction, it seems to me, would be to
say that in the seecond sentence (and in the Gosse sentence) "because" is
being used non-restrictively--the "because" clause is a non-restrictive
modifier.  We always use commas to set off non-restrictive clauses:

The dog that I saw was black.
The dog, which I saw, was black.

"That" is restrictive here; "which" is a non-restrictive relative.

Paul Beidler
East Stroudsburg University