The history of the use of comma from Classical Portuguese to Modern European Portuguese

Author(s)

Cynthia Tomoe Yano

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2018-05-03

Examining board members

Charlotte Galves; Maria Bernadete Marques Abaurre; Flaviane Romani Fernandes; Aroldo Leal de Andrade; Maria Carlota Rosa

• Advisor: Charlotte Galves

Abstract

The objective of this project is to analyze how the comma is used in written European Portuguese during the period from the 16th to the 19th century, focusing on the analysis of its usage in two types of construction: in the right periphery of the verb, before completive sentences, and in the left periphery of the verb, after subject and subordinate clause in the first position. In addition, we also investigate the possible factors that would favor the use of the comma in these contexts. For that, two corpora were used: a corpus composed of 24 texts by authors born between the 16th and 19th centuries, with six texts for each period of the century, and another corpus composed of 8 texts by authors born between the 16th century and 18th, with an original version and a modernized version for each one. By analyzing our findings, we noticed that there was a change in how the comma works in the 19th century. In texts from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the comma was used more frequently as a way to introduce reported speeches, as well as to emphasize and pause after subjects and focused or topicalized sentences and long sentences, helping to improve organization and readability in the written text. In the texts of the 19th century, the change in the use of commas seems to have occurred differently depending on the context analyzed. In the left periphery, the comma continues to serve to mark emphasis and pause after subjects and sentences with long length or prominent focus or topic, although in cases with pre-verbal sentence, the length factor is no longer relevant to the placement of a comma and the symbol is used more because the sentence is attached. On the right hand side, however, the function of introducing reports was lost, due to the fact that the authors began to pay more attention to the complementarity relationship between verb and argument, and in that period there was a clear differentiation between types of discourse reported and the appearance of new symbols to represent these types of construction. This indicates that until the end of the 18th century, prosodic and discursive functions were more prevalent in the Portuguese punctuation system. As early as the 19th century, the syntactic-semantic function became more predominant in the right periphery of the verb, because there was a stronger dependence link between verb and argument, and in the left periphery, the prosodic and discursive functions still appear to become more present, for in that position the comma would serve more to indicate the discursive role of the pre-verbal syntagma. In addition, regarding the possible factors that would have favored this change, we noticed that the way grammarians see the punctuation and, therefore, the rules for the use of the symbols would have had a stronger influence, since this was the period of the century when the Enlightenment principles became more widespread in Portugal and, therefore, there was a greater concern by grammarians with the syntax and the norm of Portuguese, which led to a system of punctuation that was based more on the relations of dependence between the parts of the sentence. Another factor that seems to have played a role in the change in the use of the comma is the change in the syntax of Portuguese, occurring in the 18th century, since in VS constructions followed by completive sentence, there is a correlation between the lower incidence of commas before the completive sentence and the fact that, in modern European Portuguese, the verb came to occupy a lower position and the subject, with that, is no longer postponed. Thus, in the 18th-century texts the authors would tend to not use a comma before the completive sentence, since there would be no longer this feeling of detachment and the completive sentence would no longer tend to form an independent I, being contained in the same intonational contour of the verb (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 13/23207-0 - The history of the use of comma from Classical Portuguese to Modern European Portuguese.
• Grantee: Cynthia Tomoe Yano
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate