LINGUIST List 15.2207

Tue Aug 3 2004

Diss: Writing Systems: Dausse: 'Written...'

Editor for this issue: Takako Matsui <takolinguistlist.org>

Directory

  • francois-dausse, Written Language and Intonation...

    Message 1: Written Language and Intonation...

     Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 06:32:07 -0400 (EDT)
    From: francois-dausse <francois-dausseclub-internet.fr>
    Subject: Written Language and Intonation...


    Institution: University of Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle Program: Department of Linguistics Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2001

    Author: Francois Dausse

    Dissertation Title: Written Language and Intonation: Theme in Written Language

    Linguistic Field: Writing Systems

    Dissertation Director 1: Claude DELMAS Dissertation Director 2: Mary-Annick MOREL Dissertation Director 3: Henning NOLKE Dissertation Director 4: Alain DESCHAMPS

    Dissertation Abstract:

    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).