Intonation and Punctuation

The possibilities of intonation are much richer than those of punctuation. Indeed, intonation alone may create, add, change, reverse both the logical and the emotional information of an utterance.

Punctuation is much poorer and it is used not alone, but emphasizing and substantiating the lexical and syntactical meanings of sentence-components. Points of exclamation and of interrogation, dots, dashes help to specify the meaning of the written sentence which in oral speech would be conveyed by the intonation. It is not only the emphatic types of punctuation listed above that may serve as an additional source of information, but also more conventional commas, semicolons and full stops. E.g.: "What's your name?" "John Lewis." "Mine's Liza. Watkin." (K.K.) The full stop between the name and the surname shows there was a pause between them and the surname came as a response to the reaction (surprise, amusement, roused interest) of John Lewis at such an informal self-introduction.

Punctuation also specifies the communicative type of the sentence.Thе peculiar interrogative construction which semantically remains a statement is called a rhetorical question. Unlike an ordinary question, the rhetorical question does not demand any information but serves to express the emotions of the speaker and also to call the attention of listeners.

- Rhetorical questions make an indispensable part of oratoric speech for they very successfully emphasize the orator's ideas. In fact the speaker knows the answer himself and gives it immediately after the question is asked.

- The interrogative intonation and / or punctuation draw the attention of listeners (readers) to the focus of the utterance.

- Rhetorical questions are also often asked in "unanswerable" cases, as when in distress or anger we resort to phrases like "What have I done to deserve..." or "What shall I do when...".