Punctuation as a semiotic code: the case of the medieval Welsh cywydd

Punctuation as a semiotic code: the case of the medieval Welsh cywydd Like other editorial choices, the selection and addition of punctuation marks in modern texts is a significant process, that is, one that constructs meaning. Since few Welsh manuscripts of the Renaissance and early modern periods (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) contain detailed punctuation marks, modern editors supply them as part of the editorial process, and in doing so, make use of a semiotic code.1 The code of punctuation, like other semiotic codes, not only constructs grammatical meaning—distinguishing between a statement and a question, for example—but also cultural meaning. Choosing punctuation, or any other linguistic sign, is part of a social semiotic governed by cultural and ideological factors. In any linguistic act, punctuation is not simply an add-on extra with its own fixed, definable and 'natural' laws, it is part of a process which helps to constmct the meaning of the whole text. In a recently published history of punctuation, M . B. Parkes says: The role of punctuation as a feature of the pragmatics of the written medium in transmitting semantic intent is even greater in poetry than in prose ... A poetic text is a complex of structures, and punctuation is one of the elements in that complex, which offers guidance for [the] processes of interpretation.2 As a social semiotic, punctuation is subject to change over time, as are other semiotic codes. W e can recognise fashions and conventions in punctuation at any given period arising out of the prevailing consensus as to what kind of punctuation might be needed, what each symbol may signify, and so on. Conservative users of English may rail against the decline of the apostrophe, but in the economics of desk-top publishing, where marks such as apostrophes and quotation marks count as additional characters, editors 1 While the poems are always laid out in metrical lines, in some cases with letter at the beginning of each line, there are generally no full stops, commas or other forms of punctuation in the Renaissance manuscripts of medieval Welsh poetry. Small unstressed particles are sometimes attached to lexical items, whereas they are printed as separate words in modem Welsh. 2 M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History ofPunctuation the West, Berkeley, 1993, p. 114. P A R E R G O N ns 13.2, January 1996—Text, Scribe, Artefact 22 H. Fulton are likely to rate them as less important than formatting, that is, the layout of paragraphs and margins, which constructs a professional-looking text without necessarily incurring additional costs. The function of punctuation as a social semiotic is evident when we compare different editions of the same medieval Welsh poems. I a m talking here specifically about cywyddau, poems composed in the cywydd metre in the fourteenth andfifteenthcenturies and preserved in manuscripts of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.3 Many of these poems are attributed in the manuscripts to the famous fourteenth-century poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym, or to one of his contemporaries,'* but authorship of a large number of them is doubtful and they can be assumed to be the product of a school of court poets addressing the medieval Welsh nobility. In preparing m o d e m texts of these medieval poems, editors have made punctuation choices which construct, and are constructed by, their particular views on issues such as the role of the editor (to present a single authoritative text), the purpose of an edited text (to offer a seamless version of an 'original' work), and the nature of professional and scholarly writing (a discourse which is partly defined by 'correct' and appropriate punctuation). More crucially, the punctuation choices construct a view of what medieval Welsh poetry is or should be, how it should be read, and how it should be understood as 'medieval' literature.^ Though there is considerable agreement on these issues among modem (that is, twentieth-century) editors of medieval Welsh poetry, it is also clear that editorial decisions are based on the editor's sense of what poetry itself might be, what is its nature and purpose. What we find, then, in the edited texts of the cywyddau...