No subject

[A. Katz]

Eleanor Olds Batchelder <ebatchel at EMAIL.GC.CUNY.EDU> wrote:

>Isn't there a problem with deciding what is and isn't a
>sentence, even before we discuss their lengths?  In writing,
>sentences are generally denoted by a period (full stop), but in
>speaking, it is less clear. If an utterance trails off with a
>"and then..." and then silence, is this the end of a "sentence"
>or just the end of an utterance?  If an entire spoken narrative,
>lasting perhaps 15 minutes, is linked with "and then," "and uh,"
>"and so," "so then," etc. with each clause (information chunk)
>linked to the next in a loose way, where are the sentence
>boundaries?  Can we say that the entire story is a single
>sentence?

Language has been around longer than writing, but writing has
been around considerably longer than punctuation. And a basic
unit (often thought of as a sentence) is a functionally
relevant factor in comprehension and processing of ancient texts,
as well as modern day spoken utterances.

The Old Testament in the original Hebrew is not punctuated. It is
broken into verses, but the verses are not necessarily coterminus
with sentence boundaries. Sometimes a sentence ends in the middle
of a verse. Sometimes a sentence continues into the next verse.
If the reality of sentences were only a question of arbitrarily
marked punctuation as a formal literary device, then we could
dispense with identifying sentence boundaries. But in fact, where
the sentence boundary is has implications for comprehension.

As a speaker of Hebrew, I instinctively identify where the
sentence breaks are. When I read aloud, I pause there. Other
prosodic cues are also involved, such as sentence intonation.
When I taught Biblical Hebrew, sometimes beginning students who
were reading a verse had difficulty identifying the sentence
break in the middle, and I had to point it out to them. After I
had done so, they were able to understand the verse. Before it
was pointed out, they had trouble parsing out the grammatical
roles. (Despite the fact that Hebrew is a highly inflected
language.)

How do native speakers identify sentence breaks in unpunctuated
written texts? Through grammatical marking, contextual cues
and repeating stylistic patterning. How do we identify sentence
breaks in spoken language? Through intonational patterning,
pauses, extralinguistic cues --- plus all of the above.

Do people ever get confused about where the sentence break might
be? Sure. But the confusion merely highlights the cognitive
signifcance of the sentence break as an information bearing
variable. As in the old standby: "No don't stop" interpreted
variously as "No! Don't! Stop!" or "No, don't stop!"

Of course, you have a point that merely adding a conjunction to
the beginning of every sentence does not create a one
sentence text. (The Old Testament could be interpreted that way
in many places, but we all know that those aren't real
conjunctions. They're discourse markers and temporal inverters.)

The real measure of a sentence from a cognitive perspective is
not determined on strictly formal grounds. Speakers give ample
clues of what their real processing units are by body language
and prosody -- and those clues do not always agree with what a
formal grammarian might have told us about where the sentence
begins and ends. Punctuation in modern writing is an idealization
of a cognitive phenomenon. But from a communicative perspective,
the sentence as a basic unit is very real.

                         --Aya Katz

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Dr. Aya Katz, 3918 Oak, Brookfield, Illinois 60513-2019 (708) 387-7596
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