â saying, for example, that a page is âclutteredâ â then youâre reacting pragmatically. Pragmatics is a particularly important perspective because it focuses on explaining rather than simply describing usage. Why did we use a particular punctuation mark? Why didnât we use some other mark instead? What was the intention of the writer? What was the effect upon the reader? The answers take us into a world well beyond linguistics, as they are to do with the writerâs social background, cognitive skills, occupation, education, and aesthetic sensibility. No account of punctuation will ever succeed if it doesnât consider all these factors. And no-one will ever learn to punctuate well â or teach punctuation well â if they remain unaware of these factors, and how they interact.
The semantic approach is the one we see represented throughout the history of punctuation. As we saw earlier, it was the chief concern of many writers in antiquity, such as St Augustine, worrying over the ambiguity of signs, and it provides a continuous theme in later writing. During the eighteenth century especially, we find innumerable teaching exercises in which the student has to add marks to an unpunctuated piece of text in order to show its meaning. There are many ingenious examples. One of my favourites is the sentence used by the anonymous author of The Expert Orthographist (1704):
Christ saith St Peter died for us.
The author invites us to consider what would happen if we put a comma after saith , as opposed to two commas, after Christ and Peter . Itâs an early instance of Eats, Shoots & Leaves . In all such cases, punctuation resolves the difference between two (or more) meanings. This is semantics.
Teachers in the nineteenth century used to play semantic punctuation games, to make their students aware of the importance of the subject. This verse was very well known:
Every lady in this land
Hath twenty nails upon each hand;
Five and twenty on hands and feet:
And this is true, without deceit.
The student has to work out what has gone wrong, and present a correctly punctuated alternative:
Every lady in this land
Hath twenty nails; upon each hand
Five; and twenty on hands and feet:
And this is true, without deceit.
Percival Leigh does similar things in a short chapter on punctuation in his Comic English Grammar (1840). He recommends that a student consider âthe different effects which a piece of poetry, for instance, which he has been accustomed to regard as sublime or beautiful, will have, when liberties are taken with it in that respectâ. And he takes liberties with Shakespeare to illustrate his approach, such as Macbethâs exclamation to his frightened servant:
Where getâst thou that goose look?
which he rewrites as:
Where getâst thou that goose? Look!
Teachers do the same sort of thing today.
The pragmatic approach can be illustrated from one of the main trends that affected punctuation during the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, people were showing their addresses in correspondence like this:
Mr. J. B. Smith,
144, Central Ave.,
London, S.W.1.
By the late 1900s, it was like this:
Mr J B Smith
144 Central Ave
London SW1
Thereâs no difference in meaning between these two examples; but there is a major difference in fashion. A heavily punctuated style was normal at the beginning of the twentieth century; a punctuation minimalism at the end. This is pragmatics.
The pragmatic approach is not so often encountered in early writing on punctuation, though itâs there in antiquity when writers discuss how to punctuate a text so that orators can be more effective in getting their message across. But pragmatic judgements about the use of punctuation increased as writing became stylistically more diverse. By the eighteenth century, legal, religious, journalistic, and historical writing had each developed its individual style of punctuation. As a
The semantic approach is the one we see represented throughout the history of punctuation. As we saw earlier, it was the chief concern of many writers in antiquity, such as St Augustine, worrying over the ambiguity of signs, and it provides a continuous theme in later writing. During the eighteenth century especially, we find innumerable teaching exercises in which the student has to add marks to an unpunctuated piece of text in order to show its meaning. There are many ingenious examples. One of my favourites is the sentence used by the anonymous author of The Expert Orthographist (1704):
Christ saith St Peter died for us.
The author invites us to consider what would happen if we put a comma after saith , as opposed to two commas, after Christ and Peter . Itâs an early instance of Eats, Shoots & Leaves . In all such cases, punctuation resolves the difference between two (or more) meanings. This is semantics.
Teachers in the nineteenth century used to play semantic punctuation games, to make their students aware of the importance of the subject. This verse was very well known:
Every lady in this land
Hath twenty nails upon each hand;
Five and twenty on hands and feet:
And this is true, without deceit.
The student has to work out what has gone wrong, and present a correctly punctuated alternative:
Every lady in this land
Hath twenty nails; upon each hand
Five; and twenty on hands and feet:
And this is true, without deceit.
Percival Leigh does similar things in a short chapter on punctuation in his Comic English Grammar (1840). He recommends that a student consider âthe different effects which a piece of poetry, for instance, which he has been accustomed to regard as sublime or beautiful, will have, when liberties are taken with it in that respectâ. And he takes liberties with Shakespeare to illustrate his approach, such as Macbethâs exclamation to his frightened servant:
Where getâst thou that goose look?
which he rewrites as:
Where getâst thou that goose? Look!
Teachers do the same sort of thing today.
The pragmatic approach can be illustrated from one of the main trends that affected punctuation during the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, people were showing their addresses in correspondence like this:
Mr. J. B. Smith,
144, Central Ave.,
London, S.W.1.
By the late 1900s, it was like this:
Mr J B Smith
144 Central Ave
London SW1
Thereâs no difference in meaning between these two examples; but there is a major difference in fashion. A heavily punctuated style was normal at the beginning of the twentieth century; a punctuation minimalism at the end. This is pragmatics.
The pragmatic approach is not so often encountered in early writing on punctuation, though itâs there in antiquity when writers discuss how to punctuate a text so that orators can be more effective in getting their message across. But pragmatic judgements about the use of punctuation increased as writing became stylistically more diverse. By the eighteenth century, legal, religious, journalistic, and historical writing had each developed its individual style of punctuation. As a
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