Page 40 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 29

they are or have become ruled out from the range of officially recognised
meanings. They are regarded as expressions of emotion, of attitude, of emphasis,
of individual whim, often of mere dysfunction, of ‘noise’. Yet at the same time
we are aware that some of these have meanings after all. In some forms of
English, as in many other languages, a ‘rising intonation’ has grammatical
meaning, so called. ‘You went there on Saturday’ said with a continuously rising
intonation is taken as a question, despite the fact that its syntactic form indicates
a ‘declarative’. But intonation is much more flexibly used than just that. If I say
to my guests, in my house, ‘it’s cold in here’, with a rising intonation they will
understand that (syntactic declarative) as a question of a particular kind,
indicating my surprise, and inviting a certain kind of response: ‘yes, I wouldn’t
mind if you closed the window’; while the response to ‘is it cold in here?’ said
with high pitch on ‘cold’ and a falling intonation from there on, might produce
the sarcastic response ‘no, I always wear my overcoat for dinner’.
The ‘question mark’ has been invented to capture some of these kinds of
meaning, meanings which are assumed to be ‘grammatical’ because they
apparently change a statement (in the form of a declarative, syntactically
speaking) to a question (an interrogative, syntactically speaking). In fact, nothing
has been changed; the utterance with that intonation was always a question. The
problem is that we focus so much on written words and their order that we come
to believe that in order to speak we first produce a written syntactic form with one
kind of semantic intent in mind, and then superimpose an intonation on that, in
our speaking out of the written form, which then, to our surprise, turns ‘it’ all
into something else. It is our focus on the written word and on the arrangement
of words in the syntax of writing which leads us to regard the written version as
basic, for speech as for writing. That basic form is then changed by intonation or
other things. As a notion of how language works it could hardly be more
mistaken.
In Spanish writing the question mark is placed at the beginning of the relevant
unit, to signal the intonational implementation from the beginning. Exclamation
marks also belong in this group of devices. Other features of speech, which are
not captured by the transcription as letters, are at times ‘lexicalised’ – they are
put into words. In the conventions of the novel, for instance, the directly
transcribed words of a character are followed by ‘she said laughingly’, ‘he said
breathlessly’, ‘they paused, lost in the wonderment of their feelings’. In actual
speech such lexical commentary is not necessary – the spoken elements are there
in the speech, for all to hear. But they are never transcribed. Different cultures
within the broad range of alphabetic writing cultures – ranging from the scripts
of the Indian subcontinent, via those of the Middle East to those of Europe, the
Americas and Africa – have different conventions around the question of
transcription, and have made different provision for recording some of these
unofficial meanings. The alphabet itself – and with it this resource in literacy – is,
however, severely limited in that regard.