Punctuation in Context – Past and Present Perspectives

Claudia Claridge is Professor of English linguistics at the University of Augsburg. Her research interests include the history of English with a focus on early and late Modern English, historical discourse studies, diachronic and synchronic pragmatics as well as corpus linguistics. Merja Kytö is Professor of English Language at Uppsala University, specializing in English historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and manuscript studies. She has published extensively on Early and Late Modern English, with particular interest in speech-related texts.

• Functions and Contexts of Punctuation – Non-correlative Commas in Nineteenth-century Letters and Texts – Present-day English Hyphenation –Omission Marks – Parentheses and Written Direct Speech in Early Modern Printed Books – Pragmatics of Punctuation – Punctuation and the Reception of Early English Texts – Functions of Punctuation in the Plague Treatise by John of Burgundy – The Standardization of Punctuation in Early Modern English Legal Proclamations – Exclamation Marks: Early Modern and Present-day Textual Functions – Emotives