Refine
Year of publication
- 2023 (1)
Document Type
- Article (1)
Language
- German (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (1) (remove)
Keywords
- Schreibschrift (1) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Postprint (1)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (1)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (1)
Publisher
- Helmut Buske (1)
There are strict formal requirements for the use of a comma. However, there are none regarding the comma’s actual shape. In printed fonts, it is determined by the font’s specification. In hand-written texts though, the shape of the comma is variable; most writers choose from a set of straight, convex and concave shapes. By using a corpus of 1464 commas written by 99 individuals, we will present three case studies of persons whose comma shapes do somehow correlate with linguistic structures. With that, we might identify a few (possibly subconscious) shaping strategies. Some writers might mark a norm insecurity by a different comma form, others might mark the function of the entity which is segmented by the comma, or the comma type itself (sentence boundary, exposition or coordination).