Article

Name: A dash in a binominative sentence: cases of a comparative conjunction and negation before the predicate

Authors: Mikhail Ya. Dymarsky

Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation; Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract:

This work discusses the principles of studying the punctuation practices. Particular attention is paid to the selection of material depending on the study objectives. It is shown that developing a codifier does not require studying the practices of incompetent native speakers. It is argued that formulating the punctuation rules should be algorithmizable due to the multifactorial nature of most punctuation rules. When dealing with multiple factors at once, the user is inevitably faced with the question of the order in which to perform the relevant operations. Therefore, capturing the conflicting trends of punctuation practice, the registering approach should be excluded from the rulebook, as it would not allow for the algorithmization of rule application. The fixation of opposite tendencies in some rules of the current code does result in the inapplicability of the rule and its ignorance in punctuation practice. This fact is illustrated by two notes to the rule on a dash in a binominative sentence: when a comparative conjunction or a negation is present. Analyzing the data from the National Corpus of the Russian Language has revealed that the actual norm ignores these notes and relies on the intonational characteristic of the binominative sentence. This study demonstrates that taking into account the intonation principle of punctuation contributes to identifying the actual norm of dash placement in a binominative sentence and allows it to be fixed in a new compact formulation of the rule.

Keywords: Russian language, punctuation, intonation principle, norm, codification, binominative sen-tence, dash

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