Hannibal and others,
There is, of course, the standard history of punctuation:
Pause and effect : an introduction to the history of
punctuation in the West. / Parkes, M. B. (Malcolm Beckwith)
/ Berkeley / 1993.
There's also "They Had Their Points: Punctuation and
Interpretation in English Renaissance Literature" By:
Ronberg, Gert; pp. 55-63 IN: Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.);
Jacobs, Andreas (introd.); Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic
Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam:
Benjamins; 1995. xv, 623 pp (Apologies for copying this
entry straight from the online catalog.)
As for Martin Meuller's note about Sidney's use of
parentheses: you may be remembering Evans' comments in his
introduction to the revised Arcadia (p 49). He correctly
says that "no other Elizabethan prose work uses brackets so
extensively, and it would seem to be an idiosyncrasy of
Sidney himself." I have recently completed a year's worth
of research on Sidney's use of lunulae (Erasmus' clever word
for parentheses, which Parkes and John Lennard borrow). As
it turns out, the revised portion of the Arcadia contains
2,388 pairs of lunulae and some 191,165 words. That's a
rate of only 80.05 words for every pair of parentheses.
Other prose works use far fewer parentheses. Nashe's
Unfortunate Traveller, for example, uses parentheses at a
rate of 337.66 words per parenthetical, while Lyly's Euphues
has a rate of 728.55. The only text I have found that uses
parentheses more frequently than the Arcadia is Robert
Kittowe's Loues Load-starre (1600), which uses 61.44 words
for every parenthesis (20,766 words and 338 pairs of
lunulae). Precisely why does Sidney's text use so many
parentheses? I'm sure I have some ideas....
--
Jonathan P. Lamb
Department of English
University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station B5000
Austin TX 78712
Martin Mueller wrote:
> I don't know of such a study, but I know a little about possible
> sources for it. The TCP transcriptions of EEBO let you, if you are so
> inclined, find out about the punctuation habits of particular texts. I
> read somewhere that Sidney was inordinately fond of parentheses in the
> Arcadia and wondered what facts this was based on. I happen to have a
> lot of those texts in a database environment and ran a test on the
> Arcadia. It turns out that the Arcadia is in the 99th percentile of
> texts in its use of parentheses. The average across the TCP is
> something like 4 per 10,000 words, the figures for the Arcadia are
> close to 30.
>
> As often with digital analyses, you don't really learn anything new.
> But you get much firmer and more precise evidence of what you sort of
> knew. In Sidney's case, this seems to me genuninely interesting. The
> parenthetical style is clearly indicative of pretty deep narrative
> habits, and a look at parentheses or m-dashes might bring out some
> stylistic properties of a text very clearly.
>
>
> On Sep 30, 2006, at 12:46 PM, HANNIBAL HAMLIN wrote:
>
>> Dear Learned Colleagues,
>>
>> Does anyone know of a study of punctuation in the English
>> Renaissance? Something discussing what exactly (or inexactly) a
>> comma or colon or exclamation mark means? I may be missing
>> something, but I don't recall ever seeing such. Perhaps it's so
>> remote from being a hot topic that no one has done it. Are there
>> Renaissance works that treat punctuation, in and amongst other
>> rhetorical matters? Hmm.
>>
>> Many thanks,
>>
>> Hannibal
>>
>>
>> Hannibal Hamlin
>> Associate Professor of English
>> The Ohio State University
>
>
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