Lately, in clearing out the office I’ve occupied for nearly 17 years (time flies), I ran across a file of articles I had gathered for a paper I thought I was going to write but somehow never did. And, weirdo that I am, I thought I’d read through them again before I tossed them. I found more in them to think about now than I did when I was 40, and I am, of course, going to share some of those thoughts with you.
One of the first thing I had to learn when I came to work for stroke researchers is that “prosody” has a meaning beyond the study of poetic metrics. As these folks use the word, it means “the stress and intonation patterns of utterance.” Stroke — and other neurological diseases — can be deleterious to prosody with a concomitant degrading of quality of life.
But, what I am interested in about these articles, is their study of the relationship between punctuation and spoken English. This is what engages the poet in me.
Wallace Chafe‘s “Punctuation and the Prosody of Written Language” appeared in Written Communication 5(4), 1988, pp. 396-426. It was in this article that I ran across the quote from Eudora Welty that I posted the other day.
Dr. Chafe did a comparison of punctuation units and “intonation units” — or “spurts of vocalization that typically contain one or more intonation peaks, that end in any one of a variety of terminal pitch contours, and that usually but not always are separated from each other by pauses. Their grammatical form is variable, but the majority are single clauses.” [p.397] The paper addresses the question whether punctuation of written texts has any relation to these intonation units.
Or, as a sort of corollary question of my own, why is punctuation so hard for people? I’ve read a lot of beginning poetry that would, it seemed to me, have succeeded a lot better if the poet had had a better grasp of how punctuation could clarify the way s/he wanted intonation units to relate to one another.
I’m beginning to see that the confusion arises in part from the different purposes of written punctuation and spoken intonation units. (Early on, printers were in charge of punctuation, but that’s another story.) Or to quote Dr. Chafe:
If “manuscript use” such as private letter writing shows a less consistent adherence to grammatical punctuating conventions, does this mean that writers who are not victims of copyediting are able to be guided more consistently by prosody? It is too bad to imply that writers who use prosody-based punctuation are exhibiting a sloppiness “that would not be permitted in most printed material.” It would seem that the question should not be put in terms of sloppiness versus care, but in terms of extent to which writers are guided by their inner voices — by auditory imagery — versus the extent to which they are guided by imposed rules. [p. 402]
Ouch! As one who has done a fair amount of copyediting, I find a certain sting in the “victimized.”
However, the “imposed rules” are not really all that consistent either. As I tell those who ask me “What is the right way to do this?”, it often depends on the house style and which manual you’re using: Chicago, New York Times, AMA, APA, etc.
Anyway, in order to ascertain the relationship between prosody and punctuation, Dr. Chafe decided to do a sort of two-armed experiment. In one arm, he had people read aloud from texts from which punctuation had been removed. In the other, he had another group of people repunctuate those same texts.
What did he discover and what does any of this have to do with prosody as the study of versification?
Stay tuned.
