Congreso, coloquio o simposio

Sentence and punctuation. The function of graphical techniques in the history of Romance languages

The emergence of grammars of Romance languages in the Early Modern period began a struggle over sentence definitions which continues to this day (Ries 1931; Seguin 1993). Pragmatic sentence functions such as illocutions, semantic concepts of sentences as carriers of propositional content, and syntactic properties have always played a significant role within this debate. However, explanations of sentences as the maximal domains of grammatical regularities, as well as formal criteria for sentences as ‘complete’ and relatively ‘autonomous’ units of utterance, have proven problematic. Moreover, recent syntactic research has impressively shown that not only sentences, but also elliptical utterances and ‘sentence fragments’ are subject to complex grammatical, information-structural, and interpretative constraints (Merchant 2001; Winkler 2005; Hadermann et al. (eds.) 2012).

For spoken language, the usefulness of the concept of ‘sentence’ has even been fundamentally questioned (Auer 2000); at the same time, the coevolution of sentence concepts, grammar writing, and literacy has been analysed as a ‘technological revolution’ (Auroux 1994). But even in written texts, it can easily be shown that semantic or pragmatic sentence value does not necessarily coincide with syntactic sentence form. Indeed, not only the mise en page, the visual arrangement of texts, but also the division into sentences, as mise en texte, is subject to considerable historical variability (Parkes 1992; Mortara Garavelli (ed.) 2008) and language-specific conventions (Rössler, Besl & Saller (eds.) 2021).

Concerning punctuation, prosodic structures and communicative intentions can play an important role, depending on the historical context (Mazziotta 2009; Dauvois & Dürrenmatt 2011; Wilmet 2011; Siouffi 2017;bGoux 2021). At the same time, the graphic marking of incomplete sentences with ellipsis points is highly stylized, as well (Rault 2015). In the age of instant messaging and other forms of digital and multimodal communication, the ‘crisis’ of normative concepts of sentences and punctuation (Mieszkowski 2019) even seems to be exacerbated, but it may also contribute to the emergence of new discourse strategies and new conventions of visual coding (Scheible 2015; Zappavigna & Logi 2024). The classic works on the writing of inexperienced authors provide interesting approaches to the formal and discourse-pragmatic description of non-canonical sentence structures and forms of textual coherence that deviate from established norms (Oesterreicher 1994; Branca-Rosoff 2009; Fresu 2016).

The workshop aims to bring together researchers from various sub-disciplines – from syntax and information structure to grapholinguistics, text linguistics, philology, media and multimodality studies. Together, we aim to explore the theory of sentences and the practice of using punctuation in the history and present of Romance languages, and to identify historical developments and current trends to better determine the interdependence of material foundations, normative guidelines, and media-cultural change. Historically, the scope is deliberately broad, ranging from the age of manuscript culture up to the printing press and digital communication.

Potential contributions to the workshop could, for example, address the following questions:
– theory of sentence concepts from syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives;
– punctuation in medieval manuscripts: genre-specific use of punctuation, layout, and paratextual means; philological methods for determining syntactic units in medieval texts;
– sentence (internal) boundaries in early modern printing; syntactic and information-structural aspects of typographic standardisation;
– sentence concepts, stylistic norms, and punctuation rules in the history of grammar writing and linguistic thought;
– syntactic structuring in digital communication; the sentence concept in the context of orality, literacy, and multimodality;
– forms of graphically marking syntactic incompleteness and their empirical value for grammatical modelling.

The working languages of the section are the Romance languages, English, and German.

Invited speakers

Mathieu Goux (Université de Caen Normandie)
Nicoletta Maraschio (Accademia della Crusca / Università degli Studi di Firenze)

References

Auer, Peter. 2000. On line-Syntax – Oder: was es bedeuten könnte, die Zeitlichkeit der mündlichen Sprache ernst zu nehmen, Sprache und Literatur 85, 43–56.

Auroux, Sylvain. 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation, Liège, Mardaga.

Branca-Rosoff, Sonia. 2009. L’apport des archives des « peu-lettrés » à l’étude du changement linguistique et discursif. In: Dorothée Aquino-Weber, Sara Cotelli & Andres Kristol (eds.), Sociolinguistique historique du domaine gallo-roman. Enjeux et méthodologies, Bern, Peter Lang, 47–63.

Dauvois, Nathalie & Jacques Dürrenmatt. 2011. La ponctuation à la Renaissance, Paris, Classiques Garnier.

Fresu, Rita. 2016. L’italiano dei semicolti. In: Sergio Lubello (ed.), Manuale di linguistica italiana, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 328–350.

Goux, Mathieu. 2021. Ponctuation et connecteurs en français classique. Du reposoir (périodique) à la structure (phrastique), Çédille. Revista de estudios franceses 19, 127–156.

Hadermann, Pascale, Pierrard, Michel, Roig, Audrey & Van Raemdonck, Dan (eds.). 2012. Ellipse et fragment: Morceaux choisis, Brüssel, P.I.E. Peter Lang.

Mazziotta, Nicolas. 2009. Ponctuation et syntaxe dans la langue française médiévale. Étude d’un corpus de chartes originales écrites à Liège entre 1236 et 1291, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter.

Merchant, Jason. 2001. The Syntax of Silence, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press.

Mieszkowski, Jan. 2019. Crises of the Sentence, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press.

Mortara Garavelli, Bice (ed.). 2008. Storia della punteggiatura in Europa, Bari/Rom, Laterza.

Oesterreicher, Wulf. 1994. El español en textos escritos por semicultos. Competencia escrita de impronta oral en la historiografía indiana. In: Jens Lüdtke (ed.), El español de América en el siglo XVI, Frankfurt am Main/Madrid, Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 155–190.

Parkes, M. B. 1992. Pause and Effect. An introduction to the history of punctuation in the West, Aldershot, Hants, Scolar Press.

Rault, Julien. 2015. Poétique du point de suspension. Essai sur le signe du latent, Nantes, Éditions nouvelles Cécile Defaut.

Ries, John. 1931. Beiträge zur Grundlegung der Syntax. Heft III: Was ist ein Satz?, Prag, Taussig & Taussig.

Rössler, Paul, Besl, Peter & Saller, Anna (eds.). 2021. Vergleichende Interpunktion – Comparative Punctuation, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter.

Scheible, Jeff. 2015. Digital Shift. The Cultural Logic of Punctuation, Minneapolis, MN/London: The University of Minnesota Press.

Seguin, Jean-Pierre. 1993. L’invention de la phrase au XVIII e siècle. Contribution à l’histoire du sentiment linguistique français, Paris, Peeters.

Siouffi, Gilles. 2017. La ponctuation entre imaginaire et sentiment linguistique, Linx 75, 35–56.

Wilmet, Marc. 2011. Plaidoyer pour la phrase graphique. In: Gilles Corminbœuf & Marie-José Béguelin (eds.), Du système linguistique aux actions langagières. Mélanges en l’honneur d’Alain Berrendonner, Brüssel, De Boeck Supérieur, 221–234.

Winkler, Susanne. 2005. Ellipsis and Focus in Generative Grammar, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton.

Zappavigna, Michele & Logi, Lorenzo. 2024. Emoji and Social Media Paralanguage, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Convenors:

Andreas Dufter (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Klaus Grübl (Universität Leipzig)