Punctuation Flashcards
scriptio continua
wordswithoutspacesormarksbetweenthem
pagination or foliation
the use of the page, leaf, or opening as units, as in new item, new page formats, and graphic novels
ligatures
(‘tied’ letters, as æ, fi,
f
enclitic apostrophes
contracting one word into another e.g. will in I’ll
apostrophe
the mark ’, used with or without ‘s’ to indicate possession (the genitive case), or the elision of a letter.
braces
curly brackets, marked ‘{ }’ ; a single brace is conventionally used to indicate a triplet within couplet-rhyme.
brackets
a generic term covering angle-brackets, braces, crotchets, and lunulae ; all may be used singly, but crotchets and lunulae normally pair to create paren- theses isolating a word or phrase.
colon/s
the second-heaviest stop, marked ‘:’ ; conventionally implies a com- pletion of the immediate sense and a logical or dependent relationship between cola.
colon, cola
the part(s) into which a period is divided by colons.
comma/s
the fourth and lightest stop, marked ‘,’ ; conventionally implies the
completion of a sub-clause or clause, and used in pairs to create parentheses.
comma(ta)
the part(s) into which a period (or smaller unit of syntax) is divided by commas.
crotchets
square brackets, marked ‘[ ]’ ; conventionally used to distinguish editorial comments and emendations from authorial prose.
dash
a rule and variety of comma, marked ‘––’ ; conventionally used, in script, typescript, and word-processing (though not in print) singly with a space on either side, simultaneously to distinguish and link a sequence of clauses, and in pairs to create parentheses.
deictic
of punctuation, used to emphasize a word or phrase ; distinguished from spatial, elocutionary, and syntactic punctuation.
dis/aggregators
the family of brackets, slashes, and inverted commas, which group or isolate a/word/s.
ellipsis
the omission of a word or words, and the indication of such omission with three suspension-marks, ‘. . .’.
elocutionary
of punctuation, indicating speech-derived pauses ; distinguished from spatial, deictic, and syntactic punctuation.
em-rule
in printing, ––, a rule as long as a lower-case ‘m’ ; often used for the dash.
emoticon
a tonal indicator resembling a face created with punctuation-marks.
en-rule
in printing, a rule (–) as long as a lower-case ‘n’ ; slightly longer than the hyphen and used for dates and page-ranges etc. (9–13, London–Birmingham train).
!
a tonal indicator, usually of rising pitch and volume, used (instead of a full-stop) to indicate exclamations, marked ‘!’; may be used both medially and terminally.
full-stop
(or in the USA, period) the heaviest stop, marked ‘.’ ; conventionally required at the end of a period or sentence.
hyphen
used to join two words into one, or to join the parts of a word split between lines, marked ‘-’.
iconicity
here, the capacity of a mark, letter, or word to become an icon, as lunulae of lips, O of a mouth etc.
inverted commas
one of the dis/aggregators, used to indicate direct speech and quotations, marked “ ” or ′′ ′′ ; may also be single (‘ ’, ′ ′) ; as scare quotes indicate a suspension of sense, or distrust of a word. Conventions of use vary historically and culturally ; the modern English set of conventions dates only from 1857.
lunula/e
round brackets, marked ‘( )’ ; historically used in many conventions, including the indication of stage-directions, attributions of speech, compar- isons, quotations, sententae, and other cruces of argument ; commonly used to indicate both subordination and emphasis ; invented by Colluccio Salutati (1331–1406) in c.1399.
nota/e
marks made or printed in the margins of texts ; distinguished from punctuation within the text.
paragraph
the division of stichic verse or continuous prose into groups of lines, marked by the indentation of the first or (modern business-style) a blank line ; a unit of argument and emotion ; the oldest surviving form of Western spatial punctuation.
parenthesis
in rhetoric, one clause intercluded within another ; such clauses may in written texts be marked with paired commas, dashes, or lunulae, and the parenthesis comprises the opening mark, alphanumeric contents, and closing mark.
percontation-mark
an archaic tonal indicator of percontations (questions open to any answer), marked ‘?’.(backwards)
period
a classical, rhetorically defined unit of syntax and argument, com- posed of cola and commata ; closer to the modern paragraph than the modern sentence ; latterly, and in the USA, a full-stop
punctuation
a variety of marks, spaces, and other signs (such as distinguishing type-faces or founts) placed within the text to articulate, dis/ambiguate, or otherwise refine and/or display the sense.
?
a tonal indicator, usually of rising pitch, used (instead of a full- stop) to indicate questions, marked ‘?’ ; may be used both medially and terminally.
semi-colon/s
the third heaviest stop, marked ‘;’ ; conventionally implies completion of the immediate sense, and either a development in the sense between semi-cola or the itemization of each semi-colon ; invented by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) in Venice in the 1490s explicitly as a stop intermediate between the colon and the comma.
semii-colon, semi-cola
the part/s of a sentence between semi-colons, and/or between a semi-colon and a heavier stop.
sentence
in modern use, the largest unit of syntax, composed of one or more clauses, and normally containing at least one grammatical subject, one in/ transitive verb, and if appropriate an object ; typographically, sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a full-stop.
signe/s de renvoi
‘sign/s of sending back’ ; any mark/s used (typically as an index) to associate matter in the text with added material (including marginalia and foot- or endnotes).
slash/es
a sub-family of dis/aggregators comprising the forward slash (or sol- idus), marked ‘/’, used singly to indicate alternatives (as ‘s/he’) and line-breaks, and doubly (//) to indicate stanza-breaks ; the vertical slash, marked ‘|’ (or in superscript ‘|’), which may indicate foot-division or caesurae ; and the backslash, marked ‘\’.
spatial
of punctuation, deploying space rather than a mark or face etc. ; dis- tinguished from deictic, elocutionary, and syntactic punctuation.
stops
a family of punctuation-marks comprising the comma, semi-colon, colon, and full-stop, syntactically indicating some degree of completion of sense, and elocutionarily suggesting a pause or emphasis.
suspension-mark/s
a single suspension-mark (.) indicates the suspension of one or more letters (as in etc., ed.) ; three suspension-marks, usually spaced (. . .) indicate an ellipsis.
syntactic
of punctuation, indicating construction of sense ; distinguished from deictic, elocutionary, and spatial punctuation.
virgula/e
the medieval family of commas, including the virgula suspensiva (now the solidus) and virgula plana (now the dash).
