‘A very pleasant, safe, and effectual medicine’: The serial comma in the history of English

ABSTRACT

The present paper traces the historical development of the serial comma in the history of English until its eventual decline over the course of the twentieth century. The serial comma (also known as the Oxford comma or Harvard comma) refers to the existence of a pause immediately before the conjunctions and/or (and sometimes nor) in a series of three or more elements in a clause. Although the use of this mark of punctuation is no longer a desideratum in Present-day British English, it was a disseminated practice among seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. In light of this, this work has been conceived with the following objectives: (a) to study the use and distribution of the serial comma in the period 1500–1999; (b) to evaluate its distribution in the two types of writing, i.e. handwriting and printing, and the level of variation across text types; and (c) to ascertain whether the number of elements in the series participates in its deployment. The source of evidence comes from The Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose (MCEESP), the corpus of Early English Medical Writing (CEEM) and A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER 3.2).

KEYWORDS:

• Twentieth century
• early modern English
• late modern English
• serial comma
• Oxford comma
• punctuation

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the editor-in-chief and to two anonymous reviewers of the Australian Journal of Linguistics, whose thoughtful comments have substantially improved the final version of this paper.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study were derived from the referenced sources, which are either in the public domain or access is available by permission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Sources

Early Modern English

Calle-Martín, J., Moreno-Olalla, D., Esteban-Segura, L., Romero-Barranco, J., Marqués-Aguado, T., Thaisen, J., & Rutkowska, H. (2016). The Málaga Corpus of early modern english scientific prose (MCEModESP). University of Málaga. https://modernmss.uma.es

Taavitsainen, I., & Pahta, P. (2010). Early modern english medical texts (EMEMT) [Data set on CD Rom]. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.160

Late Modern English

Calle-Martín, J., Criado-Peña, M., Lorente-Sánchez, J., & Linehan, S. (2020). The Málaga Corpus of late modern english scientific Prose. https://varieng.helsinki.fi/CoRD/corpora/SciProse/latemodern.html

Taavitsainen, I., & Pahta, P. (2019). Late modern english medical texts (LMEMT) [Dataset on CD Rom]. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.221

Contemporary English

Denison, D., & Yañez-Bouza, N. ARCHER = A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers version 3.2. https://www.projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/archer/

Notes

1 The term serial comma has been systematically adopted in the present paper as it is the label which has always been used by publishing houses other than Oxford, even in England and elsewhere in the world. In fact, it is the standard terminology for Cambridge University Press along with the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edn, 2017), Editing Canadian English (2nd edn, 2020) and the Australian Government Style Manual (6th edn, 2002), among others. In our opinion, the labels Oxford comma (from Oxford University Press) and Harvard comma (from Harvard University Press) would have been anachronistic in their application to early Modern English as they were originally coined in the twentieth century. The former, for instance, dates back to the 1970s.

2 Robertson's An Essay on Punctuation recommends this same practice in the following terms: “three or more substantives, in the same case, and in immediate succession, are separated by commas. The reason is, each word exhibits a distinct picture, which should be distinguished from the rest in writing and reading, as it is in nature” (1785, p. 19; see also Ash, 1785, p. 169; Harrison, 1794, p. 103; Murray, 1795, p. 161; Wilson, 1844, pp. 24–25). For a more complete description of the phenomenon in prescriptive grammars, see Medina-Sánchez (2015).

3 The Málaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose.

4 The Málaga Corpus of Late Modern English Scientific Prose.

5 General datings are provided for the manuscripts which, for convenience, were converted into approximate pseudo-precise datings for the purposes of the visual data exploration. Thus, the sixteenth century has been interpreted as the middle of that century and represented as 1550.

6 The present paper is concerned with the contexts in which this mark of punctuation is likely to appear in the history of English, which explains our decision to include the sequences of two items in a series. This decision does not blur the actual rise and fall of the phenomenon in English nor affect the tendencies over the centuries as the data provide the percentages of the use and omission of the comma in terms of the number of elements in the series. When it comes to the omission of the comma, the process consisted in the manual disambiguation of all the instances in which the conjunctions and and or appear to list items in a series, regardless of a nominal, adjectival or verbal phrase.

7 For accuracy, the percentages have been calculated considering the total number of utterances in which the comma is likely to appear, regardless of its presence or omission.

8 This is also shown in its role as a link between main and subordinate clauses, irrespective of whether a nominal, adjectival or adverbial clause is involved (Calle-Martín & Esteban-Segura, 2018).

9 A further categorization of discourse complexity is found in Biber's study where he associates 33 linguistic features with either reduced or increased complexity (Biber, 1992, p. 140).

10 Criado-Peña (2021) considers medical recipes as containing the following five stages: (a) title; (b) ingredients; (c) preparation; (d) application; and (e) efficacy phrase. The last two constituents, however, are regarded as optional and therefore, they are occasionally omitted. The different steps within medical recipes have been extensively discussed in the literature and other scholars have previously treated them differently in terms of the terminology used and the stages included during the process (see Alonso-Almeida, 2013; Carroll, 2006; Mäkinen, 2011; Marqués-Aguado, 2018; Marttila, 2014).

11 This coordinator is also employed to connect the different steps within the recipes resulting in a more widespread use of clausal coordination in remedy books, thus indicating a lower degree of linguistic complexity (Romero-Barranco, 2020, p. 57; see also Biber, 1992, p. 140).

12 Contemporary writers therefore no longer make use of these symbols for oral purposes and consequently “the heavy-handed manner of earlier times is no longer acceptable” (Cronnell, 1980, p. 4).

13 The term was introduced by Christian Mair who described it as “a general societal trend, namely an informalisation of manners and codes of conduct” […] that took place in the West after World War II (1997, p. 203).

14 The source of evidence of her analysis comes from the Corpus of English Newspaper Editorials (CENE), which includes three different newspaper editorials: the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and The Times (Westin, 2002).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant number FFI2017-88060-P and by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia [grant numbers PY18-2782 and UMA18-FEDERJA-129].

Notes on contributors

Javier Calle-Martín

Javier Calle-Martín is Professor of English at the University of Málaga (Spain), where he teaches History of the English Language and Quantitative Linguistics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, respectively. His research interests are Historical Linguistics, World Englishes and Manuscript Studies, where he has developed a particular interest in the development and standardization of early English punctuation in both handwritten and printed documents. He is the lead researcher of The Malaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose, which pursues the compilation of a tagged corpus of Early and Late Modern English scientific prose (1500–1900). He has also published in journals such as English Studies, English World-Wide, English Today, Australian Journal of Linguistics and Studia Neophilologica, among others.

Miriam Criado-Peña

Miriam Criado-Peña is Lecturer of English at the University of Granada (Spain). Her research interests lie within the fields of Historical Linguistics, Manuscript Studies, Corpus Linguistics and World Englishes. She is currently involved in several research projects which pursue the compilation of The Malaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose, and she has published articles in journals such as Studia Neophilologica, Nordic Journal of English Studies and Brno Studies in English, among others.