[EDLING:584] RE: Spanish question

[Federica Barbieri]

I am a native speaker of Italian, and as far as I know, in Italian, as in
Spanish, it is fine to connect two independant clauses with a comma. I was
never taught that is is wrong and I have seen that many times in formal
written Italian (e.g., editorials and newspaper articles in major newspapers).
In fact I was surprised to see it marked as an error when I firts got here in
the States. My impression is that British English is more flexible than
American English in this respect (run-ons, etc.). I would guess that
punctuation is not universal and is culture-dependant...

Cheers,
Federica


>===== Original Message From edling at ccat.sas.upenn.edu =====
>(Apologies for multiple posts)
>
>In teaching English writing to international students, we teach that a
>sentence like:
>"I am a lawyer(,) it is a good job."
>is a "run-on" sentence (with or without the comma).
>Reason = because two independent clauses/ simple sentences like these two
>halves need to be connected with some type of coordinating conjunction, or
>separated by a semi-colon or other sentence-final punctuation.  Not the most
>eloquent explanation, but you get the picture.
>
>Over the years, I have had several (otherwise highly educated) Spanish-
>speakers from various countries tell me that this construction is acceptable
>in Spanish. I studied Spanish for many years and was never told this,
although
>perhaps because the English rules for connection/separation are also
>acceptable in Spanish, they transferred into my Spanish writing w/o a problem
>and the language difference just went undetected.
>
>So I ask: in formal written Spanish (or other languages, for that matter), is
>this "run-on" construction acceptable? Or has it just become so pervasive
that
>it's never questioned and erroneously considered to be "standard"?  We
>certainly do that in English with sentence *fragments* such as "And I
agreed."
>(as well as in the previous question I just started with "Or".)In speech it's
>different obvously, but in a grammar/writing class, technically, this would
>get marked "incorrect," even though it's visible in just about every piece of
>written composition on the market, from newspaper articles to textbooks, etc.
>
>What's the scoop?
>
>Thanks,
>Laura
>
>
>--

*****************
Federica Barbieri
Research Assistant, Office of Academic Assessment
Northern Arizona University
329 Peterson Hall BOX 4091
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-4091
Tel.: (928) 523 8655
email: Federica.Barbieri at NAU.EDU
http://www4.nau.edu/assessment

PhD Program in Applied Linguistics
Department of English
Northern Arizona University
Liberal Arts Building, BOX 6032
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-6032