Great question, Peter. I'm interested in reading what others on the list have to say about defining punctuation in terms of function. Does anyone know if there is a good book out there on the history of punctuation in English (or perhaps just in general)?
Since written language is not an innate human ability, I wonder how much of punctuation developed out of authentic communicative needs or intentions and how much developed alongside the stylistic demands of "good" grammar, more etiquette than communicative need. I've heard some, including people on this list, convincingly relate commas to intonation boundaries and breath units, but was this the original intention?
It also occurs to me that sometimes punctuation is a means for expressing some of the context of spoken language that is lost when we write it down. When we use exclamation points, aren't we trying to convey some of the excitement (pitch,
loudness, quality) that we would expect in our spoken voice? I think of parenthesis as a way to make changes in the flow of my writing, much as I would in spoken language with minor side comments or sarcastic tangents. So perhaps we can partly define punctuation marks as those things that allow us to convey in writing the many prosodic and paralinguistic cues/context that exist in spoken language.
This question started as an argument about whether an apostrophe was or was not a punctuation mark. I have found people's opinions coalesce around one of three definitions:
(a) any mark other than a letter or number is a punctuation mark
(b) any mark other than a
letter or number that is used in written texts to indicate a pause in the spoken performance of the text is a punctuation mark
(c) something in between; for example (a) minus the marks on top of the numbers on most keyboards (but including exclamation points even it they appear on top of the number 1 on the keyboard), or (b) plus hyphens and dashes and maybe slashes.
One friend says that punctuation started as the dots writers of Old Hebrew inserted in texts to indicate where vowels would go.
Another friend raised this issue: if the important quality of a punctuation mark is that it indicates pauses or boundaries, would a capital letter indicating the beginning of a sentence be a punctuation mark? And what about parentheses?
This is about as far as I've gotten with my friends--who are becoming a little impatient with the discussion--so I thought I would see if there are any takers on the "list."
Peter
Adams
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John (Jed) E. Dews-Alexander
Instructor, Undergraduate Linguistics
MA-TESOL/Applied Linguistics Program
Educator, Secondary English Language Arts
English Department, 208 Rowand-Johnson Hall (Office)
University of Alabama
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