Frege, Fragments, Fregments

Frege, Gottlieb. "On Sense and Meaning." Critical Theory Since 1965 Eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: U Fla, 1986.

I get a different vision of the relation of sentence and fragment as I read Frege on "subordinate sentences or clauses," (630). For all I know, he may have intended to refer to subordinate clauses in both cases, but the sudden recognition that of course certain sentences are subordinate to others made me extend ideas about how syntax crosses the so-called full stop.

Comp students have troubles with sentences in part because sentences in print don't operate exactly like sentences in speech. Those of us who write fluently may presume binary oppositions for ideas less oppositionally represented in speech. For instance, take the absolute nature of the period. Comp profs speak as though no information were carried over between sentences, or perhaps as though nothing in one sentence should determine the interpretation or at least the predication of the next. Of course, on examination, this is not at all true. Since it is not, the "incompleteness" of a fragment has to be relative.

As an aside, check Samuel Beckett's Nohow On, particularly the central of the three narratives, for the use of fragments. It's interesting to see the evolution of Beckett's work from the early items from the standard punctuation of the early work through the famous so-called (but NOT by Beckett himself) Trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, wherein the comma seems to drop off SB's keyboard; to How It Is which is without punctuation; to Nohow On and the last narratives, which often isolate predicative units from modifiers that can apply to various predicative units. It's a study: he does almost the identical thing in slightly more refined and compressed ways as time goes on. And he keeps at it over 50 years or so.

Even in standard writing, pronoun and noun-related things cross over period ends; they more often stop at paragraph ends in exposition. As I continue my readings I find that they frequently do not in narratives, particularly long, fluid, flowing narratives with a high level of closure and complex modification of topic, like Henry James or Edith Wharton.

Many aural constructions, by contrast, function on a kind of apposition. Cormac McCarthy would have some examples in print -- the predicates will hang because the subject, most often the focalizing character, has been previously described. Likewise one sometimes finds noun phrases with verbs implied or appositive to a prior sentence-object. This does something interesting with the articulation of that phrase itself. Because it's apparently detached from adjacent forms, it becomes more attached to the larger flow of language around it. The reader must take cues from the paragraphing or presumed content and make decisions about how the modification-subordinations would be grouped.

Kristeva has written something similar of Lous Ferdinand Celine's Castle to Castle -- a still better or at least more flagrant example, now that I think of it. Granted, most of these can be described more appropriately by using different punctuation, typically colons or dashes, which get underused in Celine and in naive writing as well, at least by academic standards. Celine uses elipses frequently, in his later works almost constantly, to punctuate his narrative. In that way he designates some kind of phrase boundaries without commiting himself to a certain set of grammatical relations between phrases.

Another example of a very different character would be the continuum of so-called dashes in Dickinson.

I want to see how this happens in ASL -- American Sign Language as used by the deaf -- specifically, what constitutes the end of a sentence, and to what extent it resembles writing and to what extent it resembles speech.