[tei-council] Note on 2372570, "element for punctuation marks"

[David Sewell]

["Adopt-a-RED" note]

Submitter: Alexei Lavrentev

Reference: 
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2372570&group_id=106328&atid=644065

DISCUSSION:

Alexei has presented an extended argument for the addition of a <punct> 
element in his revised TEI MM 2008 paper, available here:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?group_id=106328&atid=644065&file_id=303629&aid=2372570

I think we're going to need to talk about this face to face; I don't 
feel competent to make a yes/no recommendation without further 
discussion. I would urge everyone to read the paper ahead of our meeting 
(it's only 5 pages), out of courtesy to Alexei if nothing else, as he is 
one of the local organizers.

My own opinion is that he makes a strong case for a dedicated 
punctuation element. I think he's right that within the context of 
Linguistic Segment Categories (17.1), <c> makes much more sense as 
markup for characters that can be part of words or morphemes. I'm not in 
a position to evaluate his arguments based on automated language 
processing or medieval manuscript practice, but I can immediately see an 
application in an area I'm more familiar with, encoding of manuscript 
verse by Emily Dickinson. Her use of the dash is notorious for its 
polysemy, and attempts have been made to characterize different types of 
dash. From that point of view there is no single dash "character", 
rather a set of idiosyncratic punctuation markers that may or may not 
take identifiable distinct forms. Having a <punct> element available 
would simplify interpretive markup of her verse.

David

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
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