Bill,

That's very interesting.  Punctuation did grow partly out of the
representation of pause and intonation.  I'll have to look at some of
the earlier grammars and see how they attempt to systematize
punctuation.

Thanks,

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 1:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dead rules

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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