My sister who lives in China has sent me a letter. (My other sister(s) haven’t.)
The comma-less clause who lives in China makes you think of sister in a very specific way. Grammars therefore say such clauses – called relative clauses – have a ‘restrictive’ or ‘defining’ function. And when they are surrounded by commas, we see them having a ‘non-restrictive’ or ‘non-defining’ function.
The contrast is very frequently used in everyday writing. Again, it can make all the difference in the world. Did John see his parents or not?
John didn’t visit his parents, because his brother would be there. (He didn’t go.)
John didn’t visit his parents because his brother would be there. (He did go, but for some other reason.)
And how did John talk about his relationship with Mary?
He spoke about it naturally. (In a natural way, as if nothing had happened.)
He spoke about it, naturally. (Of course he did.)
This is one of the reasons why people who say ‘we can do without the comma’ are wrong. For example, in February 2014 the Mail Online had an article headed ‘The death of the comma?’ It was reporting an American linguist, John McWhorter, who was predicting the obsolescence of the comma, on the grounds that you could
take them out of a great deal of modern American texts and you would probably suffer so little loss of clarity that there could even be a case made for not using commas at all.
He seems to have been thinking chiefly of cases like the serial comma, which I discuss in the next chapter, and where clarity is indeed hardly ever affected. But when we consider cases like the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive, it’s clear that abolishing the comma would make us unable to express succinctly and unambiguously an important semantic distinction.
That is the point: succinctly and unambiguously. It would of course be possible to rephrase my sentences about the sisters to avoid having to rely on the punctuation. But why should we do this? The result would be wordier. And it would go against the main reason for having punctuation in the first place: to help represent speech. The contrast between restrictive and non-restrictive is clearly expressed through English intonation, and it’s only natural to want to write this down.
These are all cases where the comma has a double function: it separates but it also specifies – expressing a meaning which its absence would not convey. As we look at lower levels of grammatical construction, we see it chiefly having only a separating function. So we wouldn’t expect to see it used between the elements of a clause, even if we wanted to pause between them in reading aloud:
The detective in charge of the case / doesn’t want to keep on questioning / this new group of witnesses / until the early hours of the morning.
A comma is not used to mark the change-points between subject, verb, object, and adverbial (shown by /). This is one of the big differences between modern punctuation and earlier practice. In Lindley Murray’s day, a comma between subject and verb or between verb and object was often used when the element was at all complex. Here are two examples from his Grammar:
A conjunction added to the verb, shows the manner of being …
These writers assert, that the verb has no variation from the indicative …
This would be considered an error today.
The only case which presents a difficulty at this level of grammar is in relation to the optional adverbial. (When I say ‘optional’, I mean it can be left out without the sentence becoming ungrammatical.) This is a mobile element of structure: it can be used initially, medially, and finally in a clause. So, if we begin with the ‘bare’ sentence John entered the room, we can have:
Quickly John entered the room.
John quickly entered the room.
John entered the room quickly.
When the adverbial is short, there’s no grammatical or semantic reason to include a comma. The sentences mean the same whether we insert a mark or not:
Quickly, John entered the room.
John, quickly, entered the room.
John entered the room, quickly.
The rhythmical effect is very different, though. So the option is open to any author who imagines these words spoken with a particular pronunciation and who wants to reproduce this effect in writing. Anyone with a penchant for heavy punctuation (often for the pragmatic reason that it it has been hammered into them in school) will of course opt for commas regardless of sentence length or pronunciation. Anyone with a penchant for light pronunciation (often for the equally pragmatic reason that they want their writing to look as uncluttered as possible) will opt for their omission. And there are all kinds of intermediate positions. This is the main domain where ‘taste’ operates.
But we mustn’t ignore semantic factors. A lot depends on the subject-matter. We’re more likely to see a comma in a story where the action is proceeding slowly, or where the writer wants to make you think, create a particular atmosphere (of looming menace, of impending doom), slow down the pace, or is simply acting like a camera panning around a view.
Gradually, the first light of dawn illuminated the room.
Equally, the gun may have been in the desk.
Regrettably, you have no future (Mr Bond).
Outside, several children were playing.
We’re less likely to see a comma after initial adverbials where the action or the emotion speeds up:
Suddenly a dog barked.
Obviously I’ll go with you.
Please don’t do anything silly.
If commas are used here, they convey a more dramatic implication, which could be differentially expressed through a dash or ellipsis dots:
Please, don’t do anything silly. (A more forceful appeal?)
Please … don’t do anything silly. (The speaker is dying?)
Please – don’t do anything silly. (The speaker is being authoritative?)
These are of course just some of the many semantic possibilities. And the same considerations influence usage medially and finally:
I think, ideally, you should go.
I don’t honestly know.
That’s true, geographically.
Come here immediately.
And so we might reflect on the likelihood or otherwise of:
Come here, immediately.
Come here … immediately.
Come here – immediately.
This is where teaching punctuation gets really interesting. I’ve seen a class of youngsters enthusiastically discussing what would happen if one of these marks were used in a story rather than the others.
It’s a really useful teaching exercise, when exploring comma usage, to collect a large number of single-word adverbials like this, and try them out in different contexts – something I haven’t got the space to do in this book, where my illustrations have to be selective. When there are no clear-cut rules to guide usage, all we can do is build up an intuition of what good practice is like by reflecting on as many instances as possible. This can come unconsciously just from reading a lot; but the issue can be neatly focused by presenting the learner with a judicious selection of examples.
As the length of the adverbial increases, with phrases and clauses replacing single words, the role of taste diminishes, but the above principles continue to apply. It would be unusual to see commas before short items such as the following:
People took up new jobs afterwards.
People took up new jobs after the war.
Most people took up new jobs after the war was over.
But as the adverbial lengthens, and the number of semantic units in the sentence goes towards the ‘magic number seven’, we’re likely to see a comma:
Most people took up new jobs, after the peace negotiations had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
This is especially so if the first part of the sentence is itself complex:
Thousands of people of all ranks and ages took up new jobs in a wide range of professions, after the pea
ce negotiations had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
And it’s virtually obligatory if a medial adverbial goes to such lengths.
Thousands of people of all ranks and ages, after the peace negotiations had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, took up new jobs in a wide range of professions.
Try reading that without the commas:
Thousands of people of all ranks and ages after the peace negotiations had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion took up new jobs in a wide range of professions.
In all these examples, it’s the sentence that counts. That is the ‘main unit of sense’. Understanding the whole sentence is the aim. And punctuation helps us achieve that, when sentences are long.
But it’s not just a question of length. As with the examples in the previous chapter, the tightness of the semantic relationship between the adverbial and the rest of the sentence is also a factor influencing us in our use of a comma. The tighter the link, the less likely the comma.
John stopped reading the book when the light got so bad he couldn’t continue.
This is a very tightly bonded adverbial, as seen by the dependence of he and continue on what went before. The thought in that adverbial could never stand alone:
The light got so bad he couldn’t continue.
But in this next sentence, the link is much looser:
I stopped reading the book, although there was plenty of light in the room.
Here the thought in the adverbial could stand alone.
There was plenty of light in the room.
The comma isn’t obligatory, but inserting one certainly helps the reading process, whether internally or reading aloud, and we thus often see it used in such sentences.
The printer John Wilson, in his Treatise on Grammatical Punctuation (1844), reflects glumly:
In punctuation there is scarcely any thing so uncertain and varied, as the use or the omission of commas in relation to adverbs and adverbial phrases, when they qualify sentences or clauses.
We can see now why there’s such uncertainty. The main cases of divided usage arise when there is a clash between the criteria of length, semantic bonding, and auditory effect. A lengthy construction motivates a comma, whereas a strong semantic link doesn’t. This sentence illustrates:
I stopped reading the book about how to carry out an analysis of commas in a wide range of languages(,) when I realized that it wasn’t going to reach any satisfactory conclusion.
Style guides vary in their advice, in such cases. Writers with a strong sense of auditory style are much more likely to use commas, to point the way they want their sentences to be heard. And it’s this competition between the criteria that lies behind all the other cases of comma uncertainty, especially the famous ‘serial comma’.
26
Commas, the serial killer
In 2013 in the UK, the new Spelling Punctuation and Grammar test, introduced for children at the upper end of primary schools (around the age of ten) came in for a huge amount of criticism because of the linguistic inadequacy of the questions it set. This was Question 15 in paper 1:
‘Which of the sentences below uses commas correctly?’ Tick one.
We’ll, need a board, counters, and a pair of dice.
We’ll need a board, counters and a pair, of dice.
We’ll need a board, counters, and, a pair of dice.
We’ll need a board, counters and a pair of dice.
What’s immediately obvious to any punctuation-aware person is that the main alternative to the last example is missing:
We’ll need a board, counters, and a pair of dice.
Was this just by chance? No. Further down the same test, we see Question 27:
Insert three commas in the correct places in the sentence below.
I need to pack a swimming costume some sun cream a hat sunglasses and a towel.
Only three? The examiners are clearly looking for this answer:
I need to pack a swimming costume, some sun cream, a hat, sunglasses and a towel.
Their intention is made clear in the guidance notes. Markers are told: ‘Do not accept the serial comma’ – a comma before and.
In my blog at the time, I railed against the surfacing in exams of the ‘ugly face of prescriptivism’ – by which I mean the imposition of unauthentic rules on a language. Somebody at top level in government clearly doesn’t like the serial comma and feels they have the right to impose this personal taste on everyone else. I would have failed that question, as I use the serial comma in my writing. So does Oxford University Press. All failures.
That’s where the serial comma got its other name: the ‘Oxford comma’. We see it in the set of rules devised by Horace Hart for the Press in 1893. This is the relevant section:
Where and joins two single words or phrases the comma is usually omitted; e.g.
The honourable and learned member.
But where more than two words or phrases occur together in a sequence a comma should precede the final and; e.g.
A great, wise, and beneficient measure.
There we are. The principle would apply equally if the conjunction were or. And generations of writers have followed this lead – though not, evidently, the teachers who taught the minister of education in 2013.
Why did Hart go for the comma? Because Lindley Murray did – along with all the other influential grammarians and printers who wrote on the subject in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the era of heavy punctuation, and it carries over into the twentieth century. The leading American usage guide, William Strunk and E B White’s The Elements of Style (1919), used the serial comma. It was so routine that, when Henry Fowler used it in his examples of lists, in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), he didn’t even bother to comment on it.
So why was it used? David Steel explains it this way in his Elements of Punctuation (1786):
Three or more adjectives, belonging to the same substantive, with or without copulatives, should be separated by commas.
He illustrates from the sentence:
Ulysses was a wise, eloquent, cautious, and intrepid hero.
And he gives this explanation:
intrepid is not more particularly connected with hero than wise or eloquent – all equally belong to the substantive, and ought to have the same degree of separation or connection.
This was the view maintained throughout the nineteenth century, by printers as well as grammarians. John Wilson addresses the issue in his 1844 Treatise. In his chapter on the comma, he mentions that some punctuators omit the serial comma, but he recommends it, and explains in a note:
The propriety of using the comma will perhaps be obvious to any one who attentively examines the construction of such sentences, and who perceives that the last two words of a series are not more closely connected in sense with each other than with those which precede.
So there’s a solid semantic reason why the comma should be there. It reinforces the parallelism between all the items in a list. If we omit it, that sense of connectivity is reduced – though in examples like the Ulysses sentence not by much. That’s why people readily omit it: they argue that it makes no difference to the meaning, and that the and does the connecting job of the comma anyway, as shown by such alternatives as an old, comfortable chair and an old and comfortable chair. Eric Partridge, for example, in You Have a Point There (1953) says commas in this position ‘are excessive, for they perform no useful work’. As a result, because they can’t see any semantic reason for it, they begin to use it inconsistently, allowing such random factors as the length of the words in the list or their sense of timing to influence whether they add one or not.
This is one of the reasons John McWhorter made his prophesy (quoted in the previous chapter) about the demise of the comma. He highlighted the inconsistency in the use of the serial comma, observing:
Nobody has any reason for it that is scientifically sensible and logical in the sense that we know
how hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water.
This is a bit unfair on the early grammarians, who were at pains to find logical reasons for its use, but it does represent the way attitudes towards the comma changed during the twentieth century. ‘We are more sparing of commas nowadays’, writes Ernest Gowers in his influential Plain Words (1948). And the remark is even more true today, turning up without revision in his granddaughter’s new edition of his book (Rebecca Gowers, 2014).
Where did the idea to drop the comma come from? Most publishers retained it, on both sides of the Atlantic, following the guidance of Fowler, Strunk and White, and other manuals such as The Chicago Manual of Style (first edition in 1906). Its omission grew gradually during the early twentieth century, as part of the trend towards punctuation minimalism. Newspapers and magazines on the whole avoided it, to save space and (in the days when typesetting was painstakingly by hand) time and energy. Critics argued that an unnecessary comma was an intrusion that delayed the reader. And developing a clean look to the page was one of the ways in which a forward-looking publishing house could distinguish itself from the conservative practices of other presses. Smaller houses instructed their copy-editors to delete it from type-scripts, unless it caused an ambiguity, and we see the practice spreading around English-speaking nations such as Australia and Canada. Cambridge University Press, anxious to distinguish itself from Oxford, routinely abandoned it. In my very first book for Cambridge, Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English (1969), we find such strings as ‘grammar, vocabulary and segmental phonology’. That isn’t what I wrote, but it didn’t bother me.
As the century progressed, some publishers began to take a more equable view, acknowledging the fact that diversity was the norm. Judith Butcher, in her influential handbook for Cambridge University Press, Copy-Editing (§6.12), allows both practices:
Making a Point Page 21