Komma & Co: Zwiegespräch zwischen Grammatik und Performanz

Three voices in this dialogue reconstruct the most common views on the main function of punctuation. Performance Senior hypothesizes that punctuation is motivated by intonation – a very common but nevertheless questionable assumption. The second voice, Grammar, argues that punctuation, especially the comma, should be analyzed as representing syntactic structure. In this model the comma is a universal sign for a clause-internal non-subordinative concatenation, such as coordination or dislocation. In German and other languages there is an additional condition that licenses the comma at a clause-internal sentence boundary. The third voice, Performance Junior, pleads for a performance-based, reader-oriented reconstruction of the whole system of punctuation. Including the full stop, the colon and the semicolon in her investigation, she shows that punctuation marks reflect specific strategies of parsing sentences. This is achieved by a compositional formal and functional analysis of complex marks such as colon and semicolon. The main empirical results of the present contribution and the problems that clause-internal non-subordinative concatenation such as coordination and dislocation pose for syntactic theories force us to reconsider the relation between grammar and performance. In short, small marks make us face big issues. Appropriately for an anniversary issue, we have chosen the dialogue as a genre invented by the Ancient Greeks for purposes of rhetorical entertainment and instruction. It is particularly well suited to render opposed opinions and to encourage the readers to pursue their own train of thought.