It is also entirely possible that the speaker reevaluates the syntax and uses prosody indicative of sentence termination when they realise they have only two items, giving us "I went to the zoo, I saw a bear" (possibly with a pause, as in "I went to the zoo, I.saw a bear"). As we don't know what's "missing", it's hard to claim we definitely have a comma splice. In most cases, however, the speaker would reevaluate the syntax of the sentence and trail off to indicate the missing item(s), which would give us "I went to the zoo, I saw a bear.". In "I went to the zoo, I saw a bear, then I had lunch", I think it would be unfair to call out the first comma as a comma splice, as we are adhering to the convention of using commas to separate items in a list the second item just happens to be an independent clause. The speaker is setting up to present a list but stops after the second item. The example I used before was "I went to the zoo, I saw a bear." I can think of two cases when this comma splice might correspond with syntax. So I was thinking a lot about this and was trying to remember examples of where I might have needed to use a comma splice in transcription and whether there might have been some sort of corresponding underlying syntax. Also, for me, it is hard not to think of someone "speaking in comma splices", even though, of course, commas do not exist in speech. The problem is, this suggests that commas can have a purely prosodic rather than syntactic function (which I think they have only in the sense that prosody coincides with syntactic features and therefore with where we place punctuation in writing). I previously posted a comment about comma splices in transcription, and how they can be an important marker of a speaker's prosody, albeit at the expense of conventional punctuation in the written form. I'm sort of thinking aloud from here on, so bear with or ignore me. Personally, I find comma splices force me to "say" a sentence in a way that would be unnatural for me, or confuse me as to how the writer imagined it should be said.
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