Herb--
 
Was Niebuhr emulating British comma use, which tends to be more liberal (that is, they use more of them in more places) than American usage? In his prose from about the same time, T.S. Eliot tends to use commas more heavily than I would expect, but I have not yet gone back to look to see if he uses them with restrictive relative clauses. I do know that he uses commas much more frequently in his prose than in his poetry. I know this from a small comparison of syntactic structures in his prose and poetry that I did in grad school too many years ago.
 
Seth
 
Dr. Seth Katz 
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Bradley University
 

________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Thu 3/19/2009 1:14 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sonnet grammar analysis help



I should have clarified that Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-19710) was an American theologian who grew up in Wright City, MO, and was educated at Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, and Yale University.  He spent most of his career teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York.  While he was a polyglot, most of his writing was in English.  He was one of the great thinkers of the 20th c.

 

Herb

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brad Johnston
Sent: 2009-03-19 09:42
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sonnet grammar analysis help

 

Unless you're reading it in German, you need to factor in the translator's punctuation preferences.

 

I have traversed some byways trying to determine the translator's effect on the grammar of an original, with little definitive to report. In general, it can be said that once an author or a translator is in print, the whys and wherefores are difficult to elicit.

--- On Thu, 3/19/09, STAHLKE, HERBERT F <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I've been reading Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, published in 1932, and I've been surprised by his use of commas.  He uses them before restrictive relative clauses, between subjects and verbs, before or after long constructions.  If one reads some of his sentences aloud, they work well, and at least some of the odd commas seem to mark pauses.  What surprised me was that by the 1930s comma use had fairly well stabilized, and here's a major writer who does what he wants with them.

 

Herb


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