comma splice (run-on clauses)

[Beverly Flanigan]

As an old comp teacher (now I occasionally teach the teaching of writing in
ESL), I was a stickler for the semi-colon--not prescriptively, but because
it should, and when used correctly does, mark in print the very pauses and
intonation changes you mention.  This half-pause helps in fast and accurate
reading (=decoding), so that one doesn't have to backtrack and mentally
readjust the parsing of the sentence.  Conjunctions can substitute, of
course, but sometimes a pause alone is sufficient, as in the sentence cited
below; yet I still want a clear signal of the degree of pausing (or
intonational rise) that would presumably be marked in speech, and the
semi-colon provides that (a period is a bit too definite).  Unfortunately,
my grad students (and many colleagues!) seem not to have ever heard this
rationale and think I'm just being "fussy."

At 01:11 PM 1/24/01 -0500, you wrote:
>This sort of error is as common as it is because English
>punctuation does not allow us to mark something that speech marks
>very nicely.  If you say this sentence with the because meaning,
>you will probably have normal declarative sentence intonation with
>a slight rise on the end of "now", and then the second clause will
>be in a generally lower intonation, indicating that its content is
>presupposed to be true.  The content will then invite the causal
>interpretation.  We do this a lot in speech.  However, writing
>doesn't mark intonation so efficiently, and so we can't do it in
>writing.  I think that students--and the rest of us--who write
>sentences like the one question are trying to express just that
>presuppositional relationship, not realizing that English
>punctuation can't handle that meaning.  That's what makes the
>comma splice such a problem in English.  As speakers we feel we
>ought to be able to write things like that.  As writers, we learn
>that we can't and after a while stop trying to.
>
>Herb Stahlke
>
> >>> pulliam at IIT.EDU 01/24/01 02:27AM >>>
>Does it seem to anyone else that the type of "comma splice"
>exemplified in
>
>"We can probably wait on the software for now, I don't think it
>will
>be a problem."
>
>(where the comma takes the place of "because" or "since") is
>becoming
>more and more common in written correspondence?  This is the
>third or
>fourth instance I've seen in less than a week, leading me to
>think
>that it may be moving toward respectability.
>
>--
>-
>Greg
>
>greg at pulliam.org
>http://www.pulliam.org


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm