Oral traditions have been limited in their ability to present the full range of a character’s experiences, focusing for the most part on overt actions rather than a character’s inner thoughts. The invention of writing has given writers the ability to reach a distant and often unknown audience and the leisure to mold language in new ways. Writers have thus acquired the ability to place a reader inside a character’s thoughts, either as they are experienced from the inside with mimesis, or by commenting on them omnisciently from the outside with diegesis. Examples are provided of each method of presentation.

Introspection suggests that both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonation, accents, and hesitations. The suggestion here is that certain important aspects of this “covert prosody” of written language are reflected in punctuation. In order to study systematically the degree to which punctuation reflects the covert prosody of written language, one would like to find independent ways of uncovering that prosody. Two such ways are explored here: reading aloud and “repunctuating” (inserting punctuation in passages from which the author's punctuation has been removed). The article focuses especially on the relation between “punctuation units” (stretches of language between punctuation marks) and the “intonation units” of speech, and the variations in this relation that are found among different authors and different styles. It explores the degree to which different pieces of writing are prosodically spokenlike, and the degree to which they capture the prosodic imagery of ordinary readers. “Close” and “open” punctuation are discussed, as are selected grammatical sites at which there is a discrepancy between punctuation and prosody. It is suggested that an awareness of prosodic imagery is an important ingredient of “good writing.”

THE NON-LINGUIST who has conscientiously tried to keep abreast of developments in linguistic theory may well be ready to give up. Linguistics, especially transformational grammar, has matured recently at an alarming rate, so that transformational grammarians may seem to have developed increasingly narrow interests and, moreover, to have become so embroiled in the muddy business of securing their own positions, digging themselves in on a narrow front, that whether they are involved in civil war or are continuing to extend the frontiers of linguistic knowledge is often very unclear-even to themselves. I fancy that scarcely a single transformationalist will bother to raise his head as Professor Chafe wings his way overhead firing enthusiastically but erratically in all directions. The outsider is much more likely to notice the high-flier, and he needs some help in assessing the significance of Chafe's sally-perhaps it would not be out of place to give him at the same time some reports from the transformational trenches, and to assure him that all is still well there. I shall assume that he is reasonably familiar with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures1 and the main developments in transformational grammar up to about 1965, when Chomsky published his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.2 Not that I believe the college English teacher has any (narrow professional) reason to bother much about contemporary linguistics. On the contrary, recent developments in transformational grammar should make it perfectly clear that there is no hope whatever of making direct use of that approach to linguistics in English teaching-at any rate not along the lines of existing attempts. And Chafe's work seems even less relevant.