Making a Point
Page 17
You’re familiar with uptalk? It’s the use of a high rising tone at the end of a statement? As a way of checking that your listener has understood you? The phenomenon began to be noticed during the 1980s, associated chiefly with the speech of young New Zealanders and Australians, and was transmitted to a wider audience through the Australian soap Neighbours. At the same time, an American version, associated initially with young Californians (you know?), was being widely encountered through films and television. At first largely confined to young women, it spread to young men, and since has been working its way up the age-range. Although disliked by many, its value lies in its succinctness: it allows someone to make a statement and ask a question at the same time. If I say ‘I live in Holyhead?’, the rising intonation acts as an unspoken question (‘Do you know where that is?’). If you know, you will simply nod and let me continue. If you don’t, my intonation offers you a chance to get clarification (‘Where is that, exactly?’). I don’t have to spell out the options. Uptalk has also become a fashionable way of establishing rapport, with the intonation offering the other participants in a conversation the chance to intervene.
The feature wasn’t new. Several regional accents of the British Isles have long been associated with a rising lilt on statements, especially in the Celtic fringe. That’s probably how it got into the antipodean accent in the first place. And there are hints of its presence in earlier centuries. Joshua Steele, in his essay on The Melody and Measure of Speech (1775), was the first to transcribe intonational patterns using a musical notation, and he noticed it. It would be very useful, he says, to develop an exact notation to describe ‘how much the voice is let down in the conclusion of periods, with respect both to loudness and tone, according to the practice of the best speakers … for I have observed, that many speakers offend in this article; some keeping up their ends too high’. Evidently he didn’t like it either.
But, like it or not, statements spoken in a questioning way are here, and so the intention behind them needs to be shown through punctuation whenever people wish to reflect this kind of mutually affirming dialogue in their writing. In the absence of an accepted new punctuation mark to do the job, writers have had to rely on the traditional question mark. We’re unlikely to find question marks at the end of statements in written monologues, or in representations of formal conversations; but in places where informality and rapport are the norm, such as Internet chat, they are on the increase. We see messages like these tweets:
I wonder when they’ll give an Oscar to an LGBTQ actor for their brave and risky portrayal of a struggling straight person? [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered-questioning]
Maybe we should report weather related brewery closures like the morning TV news reports school closures?
We can imagine the rising tones as these sentences reach their close.
This extended use of the question mark is in fact anticipated in a range of earlier uses expressing such attitudes as uncertainty, doubt, sarcasm, and lack of conviction. The mark is usually placed in parentheses adjacent to (before or after) the word that is its semantic focus:
(a) So I ought to be with you by (?) seven.
(b) This was written by Floura (?) Smith
(c) He claimed that the vote would go our way without any trouble. (?)
(d) She arrived in a new (?) dress.
We have to be careful about mid-sentence placements, as they can be ambiguous. What is being queried in (d), for example: the newness or the dress itself?
The range of meanings is so wide that there’s sometimes an overlap with the semantic range conveyed by the exclamation mark. In (a), (b), and (c), replacing the question mark would convey a clearly different meaning:
(c1) This was written by Floura (?) Smith (is that her name?)
(c2) This was written by Floura (!) Smith (what a stupid name)
But in (d), there’s hardly any difference, as the ironic intention could be conveyed equally well by either:
(d1) She arrived in a new (?) red dress.
(d2) She arrived in a new (!) red dress.
It’s presumably this overlap in meaning that led early typesetters to confuse the two functions when the marks were first used. For example, this is how the First Folio prints one of Hamlet’s famous speeches (Hamlet 2.2.203):
What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in Reason? how infinite in faculty? …
The whole speech is a series of exclamations; Hamlet isn’t questioning anything. But apart from the first sentence the printer took everything else as a series of questions.
From time to time, people become dissatisfied with the broad application of the question mark and try to narrow it down, usually by proposing distinct marks for the different kinds of question. Rhetorical questions have attracted particular attention, as – not requiring any answer – they are so different in kind. An Elizabethan printer, Henry Denham, was an early advocate, proposing in the 1580s a reversed question mark () for this function, which came to be called a percontation mark (from a Latin word meaning a questioning act). Easy enough to handwrite, some late sixteenth-century authors did sporadically use it, such as Robert Herrick. Here are the opening lines of an elegy to his friend John Browne, who died in 1619:
Is, is there nothing cann withstand
The hand
Of Time: but that it must
Be shaken into dust
But printers were unimpressed, and the mark never became standard. However, it has received a new lease of life online, as we’ll later see some people using it as way of showing an ironic or sarcastic question.
As a mark high up the punctuation hierarchy, the question mark, like the exclamation mark and the period, acts unambiguously as a sign of separation – to show where one sentence ends and the next begins. That’s why a period was included within the symbol (and reflected in the term question-stop). This means it can be used without ambiguity even in a sequence of elliptical sentences:
Will the event be in London? in Tokyo? in Rio?
It should be noted, though, that in such a case the question mark loses its full force as a sentence separator. Normally the next sentence after a question mark begins with a capital letter. But not here. If we try to use capitals:
Will the event be in London? In Tokyo? In Rio?
we lose the structural parallelism between the three locations.
It’s even more awkward if the list is presented vertically. Writers feel uncomfortable with all three of the options:
Will the event be
Will the event be
Will the event be?
in Tokyo?
in Tokyo
in Tokyo
in London?
in London
in London
in Paris?
in Paris
in Paris
in Berlin?
in Berlin?
in Berlin
The first raises objections of visual clutter. The second makes it appear that there’s something questionable about Berlin. And the third makes it look as if the locations are outside the scope of the question mark. In such a case, the only solution is to rephrase, and avoid the problem.
Other issues of punctuation usage regarding the question mark are all to do with what happens when a questioned sentence is included within another sentence. If it’s an indirect question (reported speech), there’s no problem: the mark isn’t used.
She asked me where I had left the books.
Usage had vacillated during the seventeenth century, until Lindley Murray made it absolutely clear:
A point of interrogation should not be employed, in cases where it is only said a question has been asked, and where the words are not used as a question.
That was that. But what happens when the words are used as a question, and are included within another sentence?
If the question is placed inside the sentence, but not at the end, the answer is straightforward, as the parentheses or inverted commas (or both) express
the separation well:
He wrote a comment ‘Is this your book?’ on the cover.
He wrote a comment (Is this your book?) on the cover.
He wrote a comment (‘Is this your book?’) on the cover.
But if the questioning utterance occurs at the end of the sentence, writers often wonder whether to add the sentence-ending mark that would be appropriate to the sentence as a whole:
(a) He wrote the comment ‘Is this your book?’.
(b) Did you see the comment ‘Is this your book?’?
(c) How on earth did he write the comment ‘Is this your book?’!
Usually, style guides recommend dropping the period in (a), on the grounds that the period is already a part of the question mark. But some keep the double marking in (b) and (c), on the grounds that there are two meanings being expressed, each of which requires its own mark. People vacillate over (b). If the visual appearance is unacceptable, then writers are recommended to rephrase:
Did you see the words ‘Is this your book?’ on the cover?
A similar situation occurs if the question mark is part of a title that is printed in italics. There’s no problem when the title is a statement:
Did she sing I’m singing in the rain?
But there is a problem if it’s a question:
Did she sing Where have all the flowers gone??
Nobody is likely to tolerate the juxtaposition of two question marks in different fonts. It’s at this point that authors and printers begin to weep, for there is no solution other than rephrasing. And there’s no solution in handwriting either, unless we’ve mastered two (roman and italic) hands. And even if we have, would readers really notice the contrast?
This is an important general point. It isn’t the case that punctuation can solve all the problems of graphic representation thrown up by the multifarious subjects that we want to write about. It isn’t a perfect system. And an important aim of teaching is to draw students’ attention to the places where the system breaks down, and to suggest ways around the difficulties.
Students also need to note that, as with exclamation marks, there are a number of specialized uses, such as the chess notations described in the previous chapter. We see special uses of the question mark in computer programming and in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) when they include a query string. This example, from the Shakespeare’s Words website, tells us that someone has searched for Act 1 Scene 1 in Play Number 3:
http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Plays.aspx?Ac=1&SC=1&IdPlay=3
In linguistics, we see it as an alternative symbol for the glottal stop and also to mark a doubtfully acceptable sentence, such as ?I gave a nudge to John.
It’s also important to develop a sense of frequency norms to avoid any charge of excessive use. The issue isn’t as dramatic as in the case of exclamation marks. On the whole, people don’t use question marks repeatedly to the same extent. And multiple question marks (Really???) are much less commonly encountered than multiple exclamation marks, though of course we’ll see a sprinkling in informal letter-writing and in excitable Internet situations. In the Pooh example on p. 30 there is a single vs double use conveying Christopher Robin’s dawning realization of what Pooh has said. That’s clever writing. But I haven’t found many instances where the semantic distinction is so well motivated.
It’s theoretically possible to have an entire text with every sentence ending in a question mark. At least, I used to think it was just a theoretical matter. Not any longer, after reading Padgett Powell’s surreal The Interrogative Mood (2009). His book begins:
Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? …
Fifty pages on, he is still asking:
If you could be instantly fluent in a language you do not now speak, what language would it be? Can you change a tire by yourself? Have you ever petted a vole or a shrew? Do you partake of syrups?
Fifty pages more:
What is the loudest noise you have ever heard? Have you done any mountain climbing? Would you eat a monkey? What broke your heart?
And it ends, after 164 pages and a couple of thousand questions:
Are you leaving now? Would you? Would you mind?
‘If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel’, comments novelist Richard Ford in the accompanying blurb, ‘it might look something like this.’ And we do in fact see question marks being used artistically sometimes – such as in concrete poetry.
Interlude: Concrete questions
Question marks dance with periods in one of Peter Mayer’s typewriter poems – part of a sequence called ‘the ying yang cube’. The genre of typewriter poetry was popular among concrete poets in pre-electronic keyboard days, and Peter Finch edited a small anthology in 1972, from which this example is taken. The writers were attracted to the individuality of the spacing provided by the grid system of a typewriter, where letters all occupy the same physical space. As another typewriter poet, J P Ward, put it in that collection: ‘the type-writer lends itself to geometry, abstraction, and therefore, perhaps, to the infinite, the deep truth that “number holds sway above the flux”.’
22
Semicolons; or not
Like exclamation marks, semicolons have had a bad press – but for different reasons. Several authors have taken against them, especially novelists, mainly I suspect because they are chiefly associated with the more complex sentences of formal writing, and are felt to be out of place when inserted into a free-flowing, informal dialogue. An often-quoted antagonist is Kurt Vonnegut. He writes, at the beginning of Chapter 3 of A Man without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America (2005):
Here is a lesson in creative writing.
First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not.
He wasn’t kidding. He uses no semicolons in his book – until the very last chapter. There, at the end of a piece on the way our brains deal with imagination, we read a much less-quoted remark:
Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone’s face and see stories there; to everyone, a face will just be a face.
And there, I’ve just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules.
Rules only take us so far. That sentence should be the motto for any work on punctuation.
There’s a preference for short sentences, these days, when representing the colloquial character of everyday conversation, and when sentences do get longer, writers generally capture their rhythms by opting for dashes and ellipsis dots. Semicolons are no longer felt to do this job well. However, this is a modern response. Nineteenth-century novelists and short-story writers used them without a second thought. Here’s Tom Jarndyce describing the horrors of going to law (Chapter 5 of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House):
‘For,’ says he, ‘it’s being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death with single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.’
And poets have always found it a useful mark, ever since it arrived in English during the later decades of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson took to it with enthusiasm, for example, as did John Donne.
Why was it so useful? Because it offered a way of conveying a meaning that had not been easily expressed before. When sentences are separated by periods, each topic comes across as semantically distinct. Two separate events are being reported in this summary of a conference schedule:
Smith is going to speak about cars. Brown is going to speak about bikes.
There is no relationship being suggested between Smith and Brown. But imagine now that Smith and Brown are colleagues who have been working on a joint transport pr
oject, and they’re each contributing to a report about their work. How do we maintain their independence, yet show they’re in a relationship with each other that is different from the other conference speakers? The semicolon provides a solution:
Smith is going to speak about cars; Brown is going to speak about bikes.
The semicolon allows us to join two independent sentences together when we feel they are semantically linked in some way. It is, in short, a device of coordination. And as such, we can think of its primary function as being the punctuation equivalent of the main coordinating conjunction, and.
Smith is going to speak about cars and Brown is going to speak about bikes.
We’ll often see sentences like that, with and linking the two constructions (clauses). But we’ll also see them written like this:
Smith is going to speak about cars, and Brown is going to speak about bikes.
Why the comma? It helps us to avoid a miscue. As we read, we don’t actually know what’s going to follow the and. It might be another linked noun:
Smith is going to speak about cars and trucks …
The comma makes it clear that the first clause is finished, and that what follows is going to be another clause.
So that’s the essential choice the punctuation system gives us: semantically independent sentences vs semantically linked sentences. And there are only these two choices. The meaning of the colon is very different, as we’ll see in the next chapter. And a comma is ruled out. We cannot write: