Written communication in instant messaging, text messaging, chat, and other forms of electronic communication appears to have generated a "new language" of abbreviations, acronyms, word combinations, and punctuation. In this naturalistic study, adolescents collected their instant messaging conversations for a 1-week period and then completed a…

SMS language is English language slang, used as a means of mobile phone text messaging. This practice may impact on the written language skills of learners at school. The main aim of this study was to determine the perspectives of Grade 8 and 9 English (as Home Language) educators in Gauteng regarding the possible influence of SMS language on…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Presents a functional description of punctuation as a delimiter of words, sentences, and paragraphs, and as a semantic and extralinguistic indicator. (AM)

Traces the development of punctuation and the understanding of its role over the centuries. Throughout its existence, punctuation has played the dual role of recording prosodic contours and syntactic structure. Past research and discussion has not provided a coherent picture. A model of punctuation based on systematic observation is needed. (175…

Discusses the use of the comma in Spanish and gives examples of its use in Spanish literature. (NCR)

Discusses the uses of the comma in Spanish and shows a poem that can be interpreted in different ways with different punctuation. (NCR)

Analyzes the nature of punctuation, its functions (syntactic, suprasegmental, and semantic), its role in written language, and punctuation as grapheme. (AM)

Presents results of a survey carried out in 1977 to determine the attitude of contemporary French writers toward the importance of punctuation. Questionnaire responses, obtained from over half the 80 authors polled, are discussed. (AM)

Written to provide a quick, simple, practical reference, this handbook contains explanations and examples of the use of English. Entries, arranged alphabetically, may be as specific as "bibliography,""colons,""dashes,""footnotes," and "prefixes" or as general as articles on cliches, books, figurative language, frame tests, grammar, and plagiarism.…

Titular colonicity (presence of colon in title) is shown to index the progress of scholarship over a century. Analysis of 1,150 titles in education, psychology, and literary criticism reveals use of the colon in the majority of contemporary titles across disciplines, thereby demonstrating the progressive complexity of scholarship. (Author/MLW)

Points to introspective evidence that both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonations, accents, and hesitations in written language. Suggests that some aspects of this "written language prosody" are made partially overt through punctuation. (RAE)

Pointing out that the style of the Associated Press (AP) defines clear writing, this revised edition of the practical and much-used AP stylebook is designed to be an essential handbook for all writers, editors, and students. The stylebook contains over 5000 entries laying out the AP's rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage. It gives…

Examines how, under Western influence, punctuation was adopted in Japanese texts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (FL)