趣谈标点：英语表达的细节

⊙ By Alice & Neil

趣谈标点：英语表达的细节

⊙ By Alice & Neil

Does Punctuation Really Matter?

这是一个英语学习节目，两位主持人在对话过程中会对前文提到的部分生词用比较简单的英语进行解释，通过这种方式帮助听众顺利听懂节目内容——大家不妨留意文中的蓝色生词，将中英文解释结合起来学习吧。

Alice:Hello, I’m Alice.

Neil:And I’m Neil.

Alice:So, Neil, you texted me earlier and didn’t put a full stop at the end.

Neil:You’re right. I never use full stops in texts. They’re much toostuffy[古板的]or formal. Texting is like conversation. You don’t need lots of punctuation.

Alice:Well, punctuation is the subject of today’s show. And I know I’m a bit of astickler[固执己见者]about this, but I think you’re letting the standards of written English language slip.

Neil:Astickleris someone who insists on a certain way of doing a particular thing. Surely you aren’t such a stickler for punctuation rules that you want to stop theevolution[进化]of English, Alice?

Alice:No, of course not, but I am a stickler when people don’t follow the rules of punctuation, because this makes written textambiguous[有歧义的]or difficult to understand.

Neil: Ambiguousmeans when something has two or more meanings. Can you give me some examples of punctuation making text easier to understand?

Alice:Alright then, here you are: Let’s eat Grandma.

Neil:Ugh! It brings to mind the children’s storyLittle Red Riding Hood[《小红帽》], about a girl, her grandmother and a hungry wolf. Is that the wolf talking to another wolf friend of his?

Alice:No, it’s the girl, Red Riding Hood, talking to her grandmother. And with a wellplaced comma it becomes: Let’s eat, Grandma. Without proper punctuation the sentence is ambiguous. Punctuation was invented by the ancient Greeks. They used a series of dots to indicate different lengths of pauses. A short unit of text was a comma, a longer unit was a colon, and a complete sentence was a periodos. We used these terms to name our punctuation marks, although they actually refer to theclauses[从句]not to the dots themselves.

Neil:So early punctuation wasn’t really about grammar, then?

Alice:No, it was about public speaking. The different dots indicated different lengths of pauses: short, medium, and long. These pauses broke up the text, so it was easier to read and therefore easier to understand.

Neil:OK, let’s hear from the punctuation expert, Keith Houston.

Keith:Punctuation started off being all aboutrhetoric[修辞], about speech, but we started toassign[分配]rules—I think around about the 8th century or so—we started to associate the marks, not just with pauses, but with the actual grammatical units that were used to punctuate. So, a comma wasn’t just a dot that meant pause for this length of time. It now actually marked out a clause, you know, it…it marked out a…a sort of consistent logical bit of writing.

Alice:Sorhetoric(the art ofpersuasive[有说服力的]speaking) was very important to the Greeks and to the Romans. And to be persuasive, you need to be understood. And these little punctuation marks helped the speaker to deliver their text more effectively.

Neil:Later on, these marks were given grammatical functions. The comma marks out aclause(grammatical unit containing asubject[主语]and a verb) as well as telling the reader to pause briefly.

Alice:Are you beginning to see why beingsloppy[粗心的]or careless with punctuation isn’t a good thing, Neil?

Neil:Yes, I am, although recent research into texting and punctuation suggests that people consider messages ending in full stops to be less sincere than ones without.

Alice:Really? Well, now might be a good time to hear about how it can be hard to make writing unambiguous. We canmisinterpret[曲解]the written word, even with punctuation to guide us. Here’s Keith Houston again.

Host:Quite often I notice on Twitter and places like that people misunderstandirony[讽刺], I mean, because we only have text in front of us, notintonation[语调]. So do we need an irony punctuation—“hello, I’m being ironic now”—do we need that?

Keith:You might say thatemoticons[表情符号]are the best way to go about that: a littlewinking[眨眼]emoticon, you know,semicolon[分号],dash[破折号],closing parenthesis[右括号].

Host:Oh yes, yes, of course. They’ve invented all these using the punctuation that we have on the keyboard.

Neil: Ironymeans using words to mean something that is the opposite of itsliteral[字面的]or most usual meaning. But when we’re online using email or Twitter, you don’t hear the words, and that’s why it can be hard to know what feelings the writer intended.

Alice:That’s right. When we useemoticons(facial expressions made out of keyboard characters), we cansignpost[标示]the feelings we intend.CY