Punctuation as a tool of the communicative and semantic organization of the text: norm and usus (on the material of the Spanish language)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of Spanish punctuation from the point of view of its role in the communicative and semantic organization of the text. The setting of certain punctuation marks or their absence always raises questions among students of the Spanish language, and therefore requires in-depth scientific research and clarification. The article studies the punctuation rules established by the Royal Spanish Academy, and deviations from them, which may be associated with the prosodic tradition of the language, the presence of secondary members, genre originality, the influence of the English language, the individual characteristics of the author’s style, the communicative task of the utterance, etc. The source material was contemporary Spanish-language fiction, periodical texts, scientific articles, blog fragments, and comments on social networks. Thus, the work reflects the compositional and semantic features of all genres. In Spanish sentences, the role of the prosodic tradition is strong, so often the punctuation marks are dictated by the presence of the pause in oral speech or the intonation of the utterance. At the same time, punctuation marks show semantic-syntactic links between text units that contribute to the understanding of the text. In the article, the authors consider in detail the features of the use of periods, commas, semicolons, colons, round and square brackets, dashes, quotation marks, question and exclamation marks, and ellipsis. The most difficult is the setting of a comma, which, in addition to its main functions of enumeration, treatment, application, isolation of introductory information, is used in elliptical constructions, in the presence of syntactic inversion, to separate definitive clauses, in order to avoid ambiguity. The clarifying function in Spanish is performed by commas, brackets and dashes. The choice of this or that sign is dictated by the degree of proximity of the explanatory information to the main sentence and the nature of the perception of this utterance by the reader. A distinctive feature of Spanish punctuation is the designation of interrogative and exclamatory intonation in writing using the double use of question and exclamation marks: at the beginning of a sentence, inverted, and at the end of a sentence, in the usual form. Despite the prescriptive nature of punctuation rules, modern Spanish texts contain many examples of unregulated use of punctuation marks, and in some cases ignoring them leads to misunderstanding of the text. The article may be of interest to philologists, teachers of Spanish as a foreign language and all those who study Spanish.