Natalia M. Startseva

Candidate of Sciences (Philology), Associate Professor of the Department of the Russian Language and Literature

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

(Tula, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-4-163-171

Abstract. The issues of modern punctuation are rightly considered to be among the most urgent of our time, causing controversy not only among linguists but also among journalists and common native speakers interested in its particular features. The complexity of the Russian syntactic system, its versatility and variability make the formulation of punctuation marks a difficult multidimensional task requiring consideration of the structural and semantic characteristics of each specific unit. The article examines the issues of the combination of punctuation marks in Russian written speech. Various combinations of punctuation units are found regularly, and there are many such combinations but there is no classification of them in the scientific literature yet. The main emphasis is placed on the description of the most common combination of punctuation marks – comma and dash, which can be used as a pair of signs set according to separate rules or as a single sign. Observations on the design of syntactic constructions taken from works of art of different times (from Alexander Pushkin to Eugene Vodolazkin) show the changes that have occurred over two hundred years in the choice of punctuation marks in those positions where it is possible to put a comma and a dash. In addition, the author's understanding of the text may require a specific design of a particular syntactic structure, which does not always coincide with the current punctuation rules. The work of the remarkable Tula linguist A. N. Karpov "Combination of punctuation marks in modern Russian punctuation" which systematized the main cases of using combinations of signs and laid the foundation for creating such a punctuation classification is devoted to a comprehensive description of the conditions for using commas and dashes.
Keywords: punctuation, sentence, comma, dash, author's punctuation, variable punctuation marks, syntactic relations.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Startseva, NM 2024, ‘On the Issue of Combinations of Punctuation Marks Comma and Dash in Modern Written Speech’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 4 (20), pp. 163–171, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-4-163-171 (in Russ.)

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