Herb,

My impression is that a lot of the pre-1850s material on grammar and
punctuation explicitly dealt with colons, semicolons, and commas in
terms of intonation rather than any explicit syntactic criteria
(although intonation and syntax certainly co-pattern!). How much of the
shift is an innovation, and how much of it is simply persistence, or
reemergence, of practices that existed alongside the now-prescriptive
rule all along?

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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