The Graphic and Grammatical Structure of Written Texts

From a linguistic perspective, punctuation relates to grammar and semantics as well as to pragmatics and stylistics. In this paper, I will focus on some grammatical aspects of punctuation in contemporary Swedish, or rather: how awareness of punctuation is necessary for understanding the structure of written texts; but also, how the understanding of punctuation requires an awareness of the partly specific conditions of written language. Punctuation defines entities and hierarchies that may or may not correspond to abstract linguistic categories like phrases and clauses. The graphic word and the graphic sentence, for example, are structural units that in actual written texts follow conventions independent from abstract grammar, as they are defined respectively by word-spacing and initial capital plus final period, exclamation mark or question mark. This makes possible an interesting interplay between grammatical and graphic units. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of the punctuation in three contemporary Swedish novels