One morning recently, I looked out the window and said, “The snow that fell last night has already melted.” When I spoke, I paused after “night”:
The snow that fell last night (pause) has already melted.
Most declarative sentences have a two-part structure: a noun phrase (“the snow that fell last night”) which is the subject, and a predicate (“has already melted”). Each of these two parts have further structure, but since the top-level structure consists of these two parts, it is natural to pause between them when the subject is complicated. This helps the listener to parse the sentence in real time.
However, when we write such sentences we must not do this:
The snow that fell last night, has already melted.
There is a rule about English writing that forbids putting a comma between the two main parts of a sentence. This rule is dysfunctional! It makes very complicated sentences hard to read:
The book with the pictures of the baby sits usually in the pink bedroom dresser.
“Baby sits” is a familiar phrase but it is confusing here because the two words are in different main parts of the sentence. You may have to back track while reading to make sense of it. Another famous example is
The horse raced past the barn fell.
Since the Powers That Be insist we mustn’t separate the two main constituents of a sentence by putting a comma between them, perhaps in our modern world of computers we could use color.
The snow that fell last night has already melted.
The book with the pictures of the baby sits usually in the pink bedroom dresser.
The horse raced past the barn fell.
Charles Wells
April, 2004
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This is nonsense. The point of English punctuation rules—or “regularities,” if you prefer, as they tend to incite squabbles—has never been to record in marks on the page exactly how a sentence is, or might be, spoken. The very idea imposes an impossible burden on the would-be writer of a single sentence. There’s nothing natural or obviously motivated about your oral pause between “night” and “has”; that’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with pausing there, it’s just to say that if we grant plausibility to that way of speaking the sentence, we should grant (at least) equal plausibility to a performance of it in which the speaker pauses not there but after “has,” so why not place a comma there? If we placed commas everywhere that a speaker might pause—and, again, the favored pause in your example is not obviously the most natural one—we would have to place commas after most words in any sentence and within many. The reality is that unless you are cognitively impaired, there is nothing remotely difficult to understand about this: “The snow that fell last night has already melted.” Many would also speak that sentence without a pause, and their listeners would not be confused. Your other “problematic” examples are even more obviously straw men. The difficulty in “The book with the pictures of the baby sits usually in the pink bedroom dresser” evaporates if one simply transposes “sits” and “usually”: “The book with the pictures of the baby usually sits in the pink bedroom dresser.” The solution is to write competently, not to rewrite the rules of punctuation. “The horse raced past the barn fell” is, indeed, a “famous example,” but like all garden path sentences, it is simply not well written. Depending on what he or she meant, a competent writer would write “The horse that was raced past the barn fell” or “The horse raced past; the barn fell” or “The horse raced past the barn, fell.”
Why is it silly {to distinguish between [reflecting semantics] and [cheirognomy]}? Commas serve as a fine sequencing delimiter, whereas you don't need permission to breathe when reading text. Admittedly there are plenty of contexts — translations from formal Latin come to mind — in which proper ballanced parenthesis would be more informative, if not quite more readable.
As for Horses: The (x : horse & raced-past-the-barn x) (fell x) — "The horse, raced past the barn, fell". Hmmm… I guess that barn race was too much for him. If the horse himself raced and wasn't raced by another, I think a "that" would be well in order: "the horse that raced past the barn fell"; if one will insist on noncomma, I think a subject for a passive "raced" is well in order: "the horse I raced past the barn fell".
(The (x:horse & did-race-past x)) & (The (b : barn & fell b)) — "The horse raced past, the barn fell… ". That one raced past just in time, I guess!
But just who is responsible for these supposed "comma rules"?