Summary Details
| Query: |
Punctuation Summary
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| Author: | SHAPERJJ@m4-arts bham ac uk> | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Psycholinguistics
Writing Systems |
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| Summary: |
>From SHAPERJJ@m4-arts.bham.ac.uk or j.j.shapero@bham.ac.uk Many thanks to the following who responded to my questions about punctuation (LINGUIST List Vol-8-586). I intend to reply to you all personally, but I'm a bit snowed under at the moment, so please bear with me and forgive my posting the summary before I can email you as individuals. Thorunn Blondal, James Cody, Mark Mandel, Liz McKeown, David Robertson, Maria Carlota A. P. Rosa, Geoffrey Sampson, Karin Verspoor, Bob Weissberg. Specifically... - ---------------------------------------------------------- Thorunn Blondal <thorunn@lexis.hi.is> or thorunn@ohpi.lexis.hi.is A like-minded soul who is there for me. - ---------------------------------------------------------- James Coady <coady@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Another like minded soul who told me of a paper which he and his graduate student published called, "Psycholinguistic Approaches to a Theory of Punctuation," in Journal of Reading Behavior, X:4, 1979. I have also got the reference: Baldwin, R. & Coady, J. (1978) "Psycholinguistic approaches to a study of punctuation.", Journal of Reading Behaviour. Vol.10, No.4, p.363-375, which I assume is the same thing. - ---------------------------------------------------------- Mark Mandel <Mark@dragonsys.com> http://www.dragonsys.com/ Personal home page: http://world.std.com/~mam/ Who reckons that, "someone maintains a discussion group on punctuation". Marks thinks it's an email group but, "can't find it in the LINGUIST lists of mailing lists or web sites, or by searching the LINGUIST archives for "Punctuation". Please, if anyone else has any clues about this, let me know. - ---------------------------------------------------------- Liz McKeown alias EM5 <EM5@soas.ac.uk> Told me about children's rhymes, such as "Dr Nick" being used teach children about punctuation. She is (I trust) sending me a copy of this. On punctuation uses, Liz related some of her experiences with an Apple Powerbook and reckons computers could teach people "about the functions of punctuation". I agree, but were such a program to become an industry standard it might bring in even more prescriptivism. Nevertheless, apparently, "When it encounters a comma or full stop, it pauses, and it is possible to get it to read out a whole passage totally garbled, without punctuation, and then insert punctuation and see how much easier it is to understand". So even if one eschews synonymity between pausing and punctuation, one can't argue with that! (Well one could... would the program be better with intonation, speed changes, amplitude, the whole gamut of attack/decay/sustain/release, etc. incorporated into it, as well as mere pausing? And what would then happen if one of these parameters, say pauses, were left out?) Liz also told me of a commaphobe she has worked for - a lawyer. She says that lawyers tend to be "discouraged from 'disturbing the flow of the text' by inserting commas". And there's a nice example of ambiguity! Back to Liz. As she notes, even in legal documents, omitting commas is no panacea for ambiguity. If you're out there Liz, and you do recall any examples of this, do please let me know. - ---------------------------------------------------------- David Robertson <drobert@tincan.tincan.org> Told me about a "discussion of the so-called 'greengrocer's apostrophe'" apparently on this List and "recently". If anyone can help me here, please do! (My attempts to search the List archives are meeting technical gremlins at present!) - ---------------------------------------------------------- "MARIA CARLOTA A. P. ROSA" <carlota@acd.ufrj.br> Asked if I was using the word, "acquisition" in the generativists' sense. The answer is "sort of"... no one has mapped every cell in the brain nor disproved the existence of a PAD (punctuation acquisition device). Seriously though, ... - ---------------------------------------------------------- Geoffrey Sampson <geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk> Web site http://www.grs.u-net.com A teacher of undergraduates, shared his puzzlement about one aspect of the acquisition of English punctuation: why now "is the apostrophe used so much more inaccurately than the other punctuation marks.". As he points out, "the rules for using the apostrophe seem... fairly straightforward... arguably more straightforward than... [those for] where a comma is appropriate!". - ---------------------------------------------------------- Karin Verspoor <kversp@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~kversp/home.html Reminded me about Bernie Jones' web sites: his thesis: "A (Computational) Theory of Punctuation" is at http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/ccs/theses/jones.ps.gz and HCRC/WP-2: Bernard Jones, ed., ACL/Sigparse International Meeting on Punctuation in Computational Linguistics, September 1996, is at http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/hcrc/publications/wp-2.html - ---------------------------------------------------------- Bob Weissberg <rweissbe@nmsu.edu> Furnished me with the names of Carol Edelsky and Ann Dyson (her diss.) regarding "children's developing use of punctuation... emergent uses of punctuation as graphic ornamentations to accompany writing." ================================================================== |
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| LL Issue: | 8.696 | |
| Date Posted: | 12-May-1997 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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