Page 132 - Literacy in the New Media Age

8
MEANING AND FRAMES
Punctuations of semiosis

Punctuation as a means for making meaning

My first serious encounter with the issue of punctuation dates from my second
year of ‘doing English’ at a university in Australia. At the bottom of one of my
essays appeared the following comment: ‘If you don’t know how to punctuate, at
least learn to do it by rôte. 12/20’. I remember thinking that the circumflex on
‘rôte’ was placed there expressly to ensure that I could not mistake the tone, and
feeling a deep annoyance at the lack of logic: if I did not know how to do it, how
could I learn to do it by rôte? The tension in the comment between a view of
punctuation as a system about which there was something to be known, and the
view, simultaneously, of the system as entirely meaningless, occurred to me only
a lot later.
The issue of punctuation in that narrow sense had vexed my tutor, but there is
also punctuation as a means of ‘framing’ much more broadly. I will approach
this from several angles. First I look at what punctuation in the more modest
sense is and what it does; what frames it provides, in speech and writing; and
what the elements are which punctuation produces. Even here punctuation is a
dynamic, productive, generative resource, which we use to produce elements that
we need rather than merely implementing rules with no sense of their purpose.
Semiosis is ceaseless, and without fixing and framing we would have nothing
tangible and graspable. Punctuation in that sense both fixes and frames elements,
and framed elements can be units in larger structures: relations can be established
between them, with larger-level frames making them in turn into elements.
Without frames, no elements; without elements, no structures; and without
structures, no meaning.
Frames can be concrete, material, such as a full stop or a semicolon, the space
around a paragraph, or the space that frames a finished text. Frames can also be
intangible; many or most social and cultural frames are of this kind – they hold
us invisibly and inescapably in a place. Many such frames exist in semiosis, and
I will look at their effects in a few cases, simply as exemplars, and look at what