Mark:
> Stephen: [ ] is a standard schoarly tool. with nothing in between it means
> missing, with something in between it means supplied by the editor, with
> sic in between it means it's the author's mistake not mine.
Also, by extension, square brackets can be used as a verbal stage direction,
for an {unspoken} aside, as in, ' "That's right [you stupid idiot!]," he
said.'
A spoken silence?
But punctuation is notoriously fraught, both between different registers (as
Mark's pointing to scholarly usage shows) and between USA/UK usage, as well
as being even less stable and rule-controlled than orthography in general.
Also, when (and why) did it come into being? A right mare's nest. {My
feeling is mostly with printing, post-MS, which in turn reflects the spoken
form of the language. An interesting shift, at the cusp of the shift from
MS to print, is between Wyatt's poems in his own MS/hand [Egerton],
basically unpunctuated, and the first printings in Tottel's Miscellany in
1558 (?), which we'd now see as "heavily overpunctuated".}
I'd point to inter alia Rosemary Huismans, +The written poem+, which in turn
draws on the later work of M.A.K.Halliday, as exploring the problematics of
the interface between spoken and written language(s).
Quote (roughly) Halliday somewhere in +The Spoken and the Written
Language+ -- "Punctuation disambiguates in writing that which is unambiguous
in speech (where there is tone and context absent in writing)."
{NOTE: Also, as follows, parentheses, like inverted commas, are
recursive -- (one [followed by two (within which is three) ] ).
'Nuff!!!
Random Rodent
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