Il fondamento comunicativo della punteggiatura italiana contemporanea: il caso della virgola e del punto e virgola
The communicative foundation of contemporary Italian punctuation: the case of the comma and semicolon

Summary/Abstract: Grammars typically describe high-register punctuation in modern Italian as being based on syntax and/or on prosody. The aim of this paper is to show that neither point of view is adequate. Punctuation in modern Italian has a communicative function and contributes to the definition of the semantic-pragmatic content and architecture of the text (i.e. the different textual units and the connections between them). This hypothesis will be illustrated with regard to the comma – which I have already dealt with in previous work – and to the semicolon – providing new findings. As for the semicolon, I will show that it has two main uses: on the one hand, it is used to articulate Utterances in a sequence of nuclear Information Units which belong to the same hierarchical level; on the other hand, it is used to join semantically correlative Utterances or to add an Utterance with a local logic and thematic scope to the co-text.

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