Punctuation

Question 1

scriptio continua

Answer 1

wordswithoutspacesormarksbetweenthem

Question 2

pagination or foliation

Answer 2

the use of the page, leaf, or opening as units, as in new item, new page formats, and graphic novels

Question 3

ligatures

Answer 3

(‘tied’ letters, as æ, fi,
f

Question 4

enclitic apostrophes

Answer 4

contracting one word into another e.g. will in I’ll

Question 5

apostrophe

Answer 5

the mark ’, used with or without ‘s’ to indicate possession (the genitive case), or the elision of a letter.

Question 6

braces

Answer 6

curly brackets, marked ‘{ }’ ; a single brace is conventionally used to indicate a triplet within couplet-rhyme.

Question 7

brackets

Answer 7

a generic term covering angle-brackets, braces, crotchets, and lunulae ; all may be used singly, but crotchets and lunulae normally pair to create paren- theses isolating a word or phrase.

Question 8

colon/s

Answer 8

the second-heaviest stop, marked ‘:’ ; conventionally implies a com- pletion of the immediate sense and a logical or dependent relationship between cola.

Question 9

colon, cola

Answer 9

the part(s) into which a period is divided by colons.

Question 10

comma/s

Answer 10

the fourth and lightest stop, marked ‘,’ ; conventionally implies the
completion of a sub-clause or clause, and used in pairs to create parentheses.

Question 11

comma(ta)

Answer 11

the part(s) into which a period (or smaller unit of syntax) is divided by commas.

Question 12

crotchets

Answer 12

square brackets, marked ‘[ ]’ ; conventionally used to distinguish editorial comments and emendations from authorial prose.

Question 13

dash

Answer 13

a rule and variety of comma, marked ‘––’ ; conventionally used, in script, typescript, and word-processing (though not in print) singly with a space on either side, simultaneously to distinguish and link a sequence of clauses, and in pairs to create parentheses.

Question 14

deictic

Answer 14

of punctuation, used to emphasize a word or phrase ; distinguished from spatial, elocutionary, and syntactic punctuation.

Question 15

dis/aggregators

Answer 15

the family of brackets, slashes, and inverted commas, which group or isolate a/word/s.

Question 16

ellipsis

Answer 16

the omission of a word or words, and the indication of such omission with three suspension-marks, ‘. . .’.

Question 17

elocutionary

Answer 17

of punctuation, indicating speech-derived pauses ; distinguished from spatial, deictic, and syntactic punctuation.

Question 18

em-rule

Answer 18

in printing, ––, a rule as long as a lower-case ‘m’ ; often used for the dash.

Question 19

emoticon

Answer 19

a tonal indicator resembling a face created with punctuation-marks.

Question 20

en-rule

Answer 20

in printing, a rule (–) as long as a lower-case ‘n’ ; slightly longer than the hyphen and used for dates and page-ranges etc. (9–13, London–Birmingham train).

Question 21

!

Answer 21

a tonal indicator, usually of rising pitch and volume, used (instead of a full-stop) to indicate exclamations, marked ‘!’; may be used both medially and terminally.

Question 22

full-stop

Answer 22

(or in the USA, period) the heaviest stop, marked ‘.’ ; conventionally required at the end of a period or sentence.

Question 23

hyphen

Answer 23

used to join two words into one, or to join the parts of a word split between lines, marked ‘-’.

Question 24

iconicity

Answer 24

here, the capacity of a mark, letter, or word to become an icon, as lunulae of lips, O of a mouth etc.

Question 25

inverted commas

Answer 25

one of the dis/aggregators, used to indicate direct speech and quotations, marked “ ” or ′′ ′′ ; may also be single (‘ ’, ′ ′) ; as scare quotes indicate a suspension of sense, or distrust of a word. Conventions of use vary historically and culturally ; the modern English set of conventions dates only from 1857.

Question 26

lunula/e

Answer 26

round brackets, marked ‘( )’ ; historically used in many conventions, including the indication of stage-directions, attributions of speech, compar- isons, quotations, sententae, and other cruces of argument ; commonly used to indicate both subordination and emphasis ; invented by Colluccio Salutati (1331–1406) in c.1399.

Question 27

nota/e

Answer 27

marks made or printed in the margins of texts ; distinguished from punctuation within the text.

Question 28

paragraph

Answer 28

the division of stichic verse or continuous prose into groups of lines, marked by the indentation of the first or (modern business-style) a blank line ; a unit of argument and emotion ; the oldest surviving form of Western spatial punctuation.

Question 29

parenthesis

Answer 29

in rhetoric, one clause intercluded within another ; such clauses may in written texts be marked with paired commas, dashes, or lunulae, and the parenthesis comprises the opening mark, alphanumeric contents, and closing mark.

Question 30

percontation-mark

Answer 30

an archaic tonal indicator of percontations (questions open to any answer), marked ‘?’.(backwards)

Question 31

period

Answer 31

a classical, rhetorically defined unit of syntax and argument, com- posed of cola and commata ; closer to the modern paragraph than the modern sentence ; latterly, and in the USA, a full-stop

Question 32

punctuation

Answer 32

a variety of marks, spaces, and other signs (such as distinguishing type-faces or founts) placed within the text to articulate, dis/ambiguate, or otherwise refine and/or display the sense.

Question 33

?

Answer 33

a tonal indicator, usually of rising pitch, used (instead of a full- stop) to indicate questions, marked ‘?’ ; may be used both medially and terminally.

Question 34

semi-colon/s

Answer 34

the third heaviest stop, marked ‘;’ ; conventionally implies completion of the immediate sense, and either a development in the sense between semi-cola or the itemization of each semi-colon ; invented by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) in Venice in the 1490s explicitly as a stop intermediate between the colon and the comma.

Question 35

semii-colon, semi-cola

Answer 35

the part/s of a sentence between semi-colons, and/or between a semi-colon and a heavier stop.

Question 36

sentence

Answer 36

in modern use, the largest unit of syntax, composed of one or more clauses, and normally containing at least one grammatical subject, one in/ transitive verb, and if appropriate an object ; typographically, sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a full-stop.

Question 37

signe/s de renvoi

Answer 37

‘sign/s of sending back’ ; any mark/s used (typically as an index) to associate matter in the text with added material (including marginalia and foot- or endnotes).

Question 38

slash/es

Answer 38

a sub-family of dis/aggregators comprising the forward slash (or sol- idus), marked ‘/’, used singly to indicate alternatives (as ‘s/he’) and line-breaks, and doubly (//) to indicate stanza-breaks ; the vertical slash, marked ‘|’ (or in superscript ‘|’), which may indicate foot-division or caesurae ; and the backslash, marked ‘\’.

Question 39

spatial

Answer 39

of punctuation, deploying space rather than a mark or face etc. ; dis- tinguished from deictic, elocutionary, and syntactic punctuation.

Question 40

stops

Answer 40

a family of punctuation-marks comprising the comma, semi-colon, colon, and full-stop, syntactically indicating some degree of completion of sense, and elocutionarily suggesting a pause or emphasis.

Question 41

suspension-mark/s

Answer 41

a single suspension-mark (.) indicates the suspension of one or more letters (as in etc., ed.) ; three suspension-marks, usually spaced (. . .) indicate an ellipsis.

Question 42

syntactic

Answer 42

of punctuation, indicating construction of sense ; distinguished from deictic, elocutionary, and spatial punctuation.

Question 43

virgula/e

Answer 43

the medieval family of commas, including the virgula suspensiva (now the solidus) and virgula plana (now the dash).