Relative clauses and commas (was: Re: "certain" inThe First Noel)

[Bradley A. Esparza]

I fall back on Strunk and White, the prescriptivist's choice in my college
days at the UWa in the early 80's. I believe it was whenever a natural pause
in speech occurs, or something like that. It has been my dictator ever
since.

On 8/2/07, David Borowitz <borowitz at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Does anyone know the history of the use of commas to set off relative
> clauses in English? My hunch is it has a storied history (maybe back to
> Latin or Greek?), as some languages (e.g. Spanish) seem to have rules
> similar to English, whereas others (e.g. Russian) have far more obligatory
> commas.
>
>
> On 8/2/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> >
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> > Subject:      Re: "certain" inThe First Noel
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > On Aug 2, 2007, at 9:59 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
> >
> > > At 12:43 PM -0400 8/2/07, Mark Mandel wrote:
> > >> Yup. It's a garden path sentence. The catch is that the obvious
> > >> interpretation of "The first Noel", as referring to the first
> > >> Christmas,
> > >> doesn't work. Instead, I take it as referring to the greeting: The
> > >> angels'
> > >> first Christmas greeting was uttered to certain poor shepherds.
> > >
> > > Ah, so you and dInIs are taking it as "The first
> > > Noël that the angels did say..."!  I always
> > > assumed the parenthetical reading as you describe
> > > it below, although as you convincingly argue this
> > > is indeed hard to sustain semantically.
> >
> > well, the punctuation indicates a parenthetical.  unfortunately, the
> > carol is old enough to have a restrictive relative ("(that) the
> > angels did say") set off by commas, something we (mostly) don't do
> > any more.
> >
> > arnold
> >
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>
>
> --
> It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
>     -Tom Stoppard
>
> Borowitz
>
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>



-- 
Bradley A. Esparza

"You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think." Dorothy
Parker, when asked to use the word 'horticulture' in a sentence.

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