Intrinsic to the term Musical Punctuation is the analogy between music and language: like language, music expresses ideas through various grammatical and rhetorical units, such as phrases, periods, and paragraphs; these units, according to the extent to which they convey completeness or incompleteness, are more or less separated from each other through the pauses, rests, and inflections of punctuation. Such an analogy is not conceptually difficult. We are accustomed to the exchange of terminology between language and music: music theorists analyze the “sentence” and “paragraph” structure of a composition; performers determine how best to “phrase” a given passage. In fact, much of music's basic terminology is, in its inception, verbal—meter, rhythm, cadence, period, theme, composition—all are either grammatical or rhetorical in their origin.

For modern musicians, however, these terms have retained only the loosest ties to their original linguistic counterparts. For instance, could one imagine a modern violin instructor thus apostrophizing: “Diastolica (from Διαστoλὴ) is one of the most necessary things in melodic composition … What can one think of a man who cannot even arrange six clear words of his mother tongue and set them down intelligibly on paper, but nevertheless considers himself a trained composer?” Leopold Mozart, at any event, considered this speech on the theory of diastolica, which explains how speech is made intelligible by the modulating influence of punctuation, to be a logical corollary from the subject of bow control in cantilena-styled compositions.