Edmond,
   I think an adverbial structure opening a sentence is also given it's
own intonation unit. (It has been called "marked theme" to designate
its heightened thematic function.) "As a child, he was shy. As an
adult, he is anything but." That's four intonation units as marked by
the punctuation. "He was shy as a child, anything but as an adult"
gives us just two.
   There are, of course, occassions in which the structure wold create
ambiguities. John Crow gsave us a few yesterday in his ATEG talk. (I'm
at the conference and having my usual good time.) "As I ate my dog Sam
watched." "As I ate, my dog Sam watched." My dog", of course, is
potentially complement of "ate", so we need the tone marker to close
that group off before the main clause starts.
   I think it's enormously helpful to start with intonation, but, as you
imply at the end of your post, some of the traditional rules are
syntactic, not prosodic, and there are some aribitrary aspects of the
system, as there would be for any system to represent speech in
writing. (We use the comma, not a smiley face. We put the question mark
after if it's English, but do it differently in Spanish. Parentheses
can contain more than one sentence, as I'm doing here, and leave you
waiting for closure of that departure. And so on.)
   I think "put it where you breathe or where you hear a pause" is a
mistake, not at all good advice, nothing you can scaffold off of. Don't
do it unless you are prepared to criticize the writer's breathing. But
to say that the intonation grammar of speech carries over into writing
is enormously helpful.
   I have good luck with the opening sentence to King's "I Have a Dream"
speech. I'll have to do it from memory here. "Five score years ago, a
great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the
Emancipation Proclamation." Wriiten that way and spoken that way, he
portions out the meaning into four groups. The rewritten (one group)
version would be something like "The great American whose staute
symbolically shadows us signed the Emancipation Proclamation five score
years ago." I have never had anyone tell me the second version is
better, especiallhy when we look at the next sentence. "It came..." The
first version gives us a marked theme and a non-restrictive relative
clause, but intonation is what gives us a feel for the effectiveness of
those choices, with punctuation working in full harmony.
   We should embrace intonation as very useful to our teaching, but not a
replacement for conscious understanding, which is what "put it where
you hear a pause" is all about. It helps students to know they already
have an internalized system, but helps if we bring that system to
light.
   And that won't get us all the way home. If you want to master writing,
you've got to know more than that.


Craig
>

Punctuation is indeed the means by which we attempt to reproduce the
> pauses, changes of pitch, etc., that arise from grammatical features in
> what we say. For example, all appositional phrases and adjectival clauses
> that provide non-restrictive information are said at a lower pitch
> (compare
> 'The professor who had a bald head came in' -- picking out one professor
> from a group, 'restrictive', -- with 'The professor, who had a bald head,
> came in' -- one professor, additional non-essential information,
> 'non-restrictive') . The two commas are therefore essential in the writing
> and correspond to the change of pitch. Ask students to say the sentence in
> question and they will discover that their own brain already knows the
> difference between restrictive and non-restrictive, for they automatically
> say the non-restruictive clause at a lower pitch.
>
> Another example is the hyphen. Again one can show students that they
> already know about the presence of the hyphen for in saying one, the pitch
> always falls for the second part. I ask 'Which would you rather have, a
> half-baked pie, or a half baked pie?' The '-baked' is said at a lower
> pitch
> and with a slightly lower volume than 'baked'. The point originally was to
> distinguish an adjective that went with the other half of the hyphenated
> pair from the case where it governs the following noun: compare 'a
> white-hot tap' with 'a white hot tap'.
>
> The period (or full-stop, as we say in Britain) is obviously related to
> its
> grammatical function. Similarly for the comma separating an adverb clause
> at the beginning of a sentence from what follows. To omit all punctuation
> would suggest that one spoke like the Daleks in 'Doctor Who' -- that is,
> if
> you Americans are acquainted with Doctor Who!
>
> Edmond Wright
>
> Dr. Edmond Wright
> 3 Boathouse Court
> Trafalgar Road
> Cambridge
> CB4 1DU
> Tel.:  00 - 44 - (0)1223 350256
> Email:  [log in to unmask]
> Website:  http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33
>
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