Syntactic and prosodic aspects of the punctuation system

notes on the grammatization of 16th-century Portuguese

Abstract

Having as a starting point the conceptual problems related to the relations between speech and writing represented by punctuation, this article investigates the theoretical-normative treatment given to this linguistic phenomenon in inaugural works of Portuguese grammaticography. In particular, such article seeks to analyze the categorization of punctuation as part of the orthography of the language, as well as to identify, interpret and interrelate the syntactic and prosodic aspects from which punctuation marks are normalized during the 1500s. To this end, the treatise by Pero Magalhães de Gândavo (1981 [1574]) was defined as the corpus. However, to meet the requirement of reconstituting the horizon of retrospective research (cf. AUROUX, 2014), data on the punctuation marks used and/or standardized in medieval manuscripts, in Renaissance prints and in the grammar of João de Barros (1540) are also part of the notes developed herein. This study, situated in the field of  Historiography of Linguistics (cf. ALTMAN, 2019; BATISTA, 2015, 2019; KOERNER, 2014; SWIGGERS, 2019), combines external and internal aspects of analysis, although it focuses on the linguistic materiality of the aforementioned works. The resulting bibliographic survey and the data analysis show that, since the first gestures of Portuguese grammatization, the punctuation system was already presented based on confluences between syntax and prosody, or between the delimitation of sentence constituents and the demarcation of pauses that are characteristic of intonation. Thus, they suggest the pertinence of examining punctuation in a less polarized point of view regarding these two constitutive dimensions of its normatization throughout history.