"comma intonation" cite, anyone?

[Stephen Goranson]

Quoting Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>:

> Does anyone know what the first occurrence of "comma intonation", the
> intonation contour assigned to parentheticals and non-restrictive
> relative clauses like this one, was?  The OED doesn't have an entry
> for "comma intonation", although it's used a lot in linguistics, so I
> can't check (much less try to antedate) their records.

I don't know the first, but for starters toward the first, jstor has examples
back to 1943. Found on Gooble Books, but typed from the book:

Public Speaking for Technical Men, by S. Marion Tucker (NY and London:
McGraw-Hill, 1939), Chapter 8, Opening the Speech: Greetings and Compliments.
Forms of Greeting. pp. 87-88:

....As with Morrison, a pleasant manner may be greeting enough just in itself.
But if instinctive feeling for formality and courtesy must have its noble way,
one can use after his "Ladies and gentlemen" the vocal tone that denotes the
comma, not the colon--not ":" but ",". The [/p.88] colon intonation and the
comma intonation mark the difference between formality and informality. The
colon says, "Listen: I'm going to make a speech." The comma says, "Friends, I
want to talk with you."

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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