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Title:
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Written Language and Intonation. Theme in written language
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Author:
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Francois Dausse
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III
, Department of French and Latin Literature and Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2001
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Writing Systems
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Director(s):
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Mary-Annick Morel
Claude Delmas
Alain Deschamps
Henning Nølke
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Abstract:
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Intonation in written language is not a linguistically-questionned matter because the communication pattern it involves is not globally taken into account. This pattern can be figured like this: you choose to write because you cannot talk to the person(s) you wish to now. As a result, you have to represent her/him linguistically in your mind i.e. what s/he knows, what s/he doesn't and to modify her/his image one utterance after the other, i.e. what s/he knows, what s/he still doesn't know at any given time of your writing. The representation involved also includes her/his impossibility to interfer with your speech: s/he cannot interrupt you any moment. What you do then is to imagine yourself speaking to someone else, that is you build sentences syntactically and you 'speak' them to that virtual her/him. Moreover, the writer puts him- or herself constantly in the reader's position through rereading, i.e. written language is not intrinsically ambiguous. Writing consists in taking down a pre-syntactized because pre-uttered form, but only the syntactic level will be taken down. Reading will then consist in the reconstruction of the discursive level from the syntactic one. This reconstruction is not a difficult one, given that the reader unconsciously knows that what s/he is reading has the feature 'this has already been said'. Moreover, the writer interfers with her/his own encoding through punctuation marks which helps guide the reader in pointing out the problems arising from interferences between syntactic level and discursive one, the problem consisting in signalizing the reader the duplication of syntactic structures as there is only one written utterance in for example any book but quite a number of sentences in it.
My study of the comma helps specify the punctuation mark function: it confirms the right intonation pattern the reader must find (through rereading if necessary). One of the comma role, when at the beginning of a sentence (after a prepositional phrase or on each side of an adverbial located just after the grammatical subject) is to confirm the change of the syntactic theme. As a general rule, the 'puncteme' function is to mark the possible conflict between two linearizations (syntactic, discursive, narrative, story, linearizations).
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Page Updated: 27-Nov-2009
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