Fawcett's 'Starter' And 'Ender' Elements

 Fawcett (2010: 215-6, 216n):

… the present model also includes punctuation (and intonation, which we shall not discuss further here). Two elements that are expounded by punctuation marks in written text are the starter and the ender. These can occur in any unit. The starter only occurs in an embedded unit, and it is expounded by a comma, a dash or a bracket, while the ender occurs with both embedded and unembedded units, and it is expounded by a wide range of punctuation marks — but most frequently by a full stop at the end of a clause (as shown in Appendix B). And there are equivalent exponents of the starter and ender in spoken text.¹⁹

¹⁹ The meanings of intonation are realised, like the meanings of punctuation, in items (in a broad sense of the term) including those that expound the starter and the ender. For a general account of the model of intonation in the Cardiff Grammar, see Tench (1996), and for a description of the first stage of its implementation in COMMUNAL, see Fawcett (1970).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, punctuation marks are a component of graphology, the systems of the expression plane for written mode. In Fawcett's model, punctuation is incongruously located at the level of syntax, which is a model of the content plane of language.

[2] To be clear, here Fawcett introduces two elements named for their structural position, starter and ender, despite having previously (pp213-4n) criticised the labels 'pre-deictic', and 'pre-numerative' as "purely positional labels". Moreover, neither of these functional syntactic elements is realised by syntactic forms.

[3] To be clear, this is a bare assertion, unsupported by evidence or argument. Moreover, if tone groups were structured with demarcative elements, such elements would only consistently demarcate boundaries of the information unit, a unit which does not feature in Fawcett's model of syntax. 

Further, the distribution of tone groups (realising information units), the system of TONALITY, is only one of three systems of intonation, the others being TONICITY (tonic placement, realising the focus of New information), and TONE (pitch movement realising interpersonal distinctions).