A study of the use of comma in the history of European Portuguese

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the use of comma in the writing of European Portuguese from the 16th to 19th centuries in two types of constructions: before completive clause and after subject and non-clausal adjunct or dependent clause in first position. For that, we used a corpus of 24 texts by authors born between the 16th and 19th centuries. We observed that, in the 16h and 17th centuries, the comma was used more frequently to help in the organization and reading of the text, indicating discursive and prosodic relations. However, in the 18th and 19th centuries, although the comma continues to serve to indicate the discursive role of the pre-verbal phrase, especially of pre-verbal subjects, before completive clauses such function was lost, as the authors began to pay more attention to the relation of complementarity between verb and argument, preferring not to separate the two. One possible factor that would have favoured this change seems to be the fact that, from the second half of the 18th century on, with the diffusion of the Enlightenment in Portugal, grammarians became more concerned with the norm and syntax of Portuguese, which led the punctuation system to be more based on logical-grammatical function.