A Grammar of Punctuation in Poetry: Modern Computational Linguistic Perspectives

Abstract

The field of linguistics focuses on the spoken incarnation of language and considers written phenomena as an imperfect approximation of the former. The author argues that present understanding of punctuation as a subsystem of human language is inadequate, and that even when studies examine punctuation from a linguistic standpoint, they emphasize modern written language and American English in particular. It is, however, quite possible to describe the behavior of punctuations with the same methodology that was until recently reserved for spoken language. Just as language develops over time and changes from place to place, so too does punctuation. This paper argues for the compatibility between recent developments in computational linguistics' approaches to punctuation and textual criticsm that attends to punctuation in poetry. A full understanding of its conventions is crticial for a proper interpretation of meaning. Furthermore, the author shows that the relevance of these studies to literary analysis remains unexplored. Nevertheless, with the developing techniques made possible through computational linguistics, the potential for in-depth study is expanding.