A text-sentence is delimited by an initial capital letter and a final full stop, question mark or exclamation mark < . ? ! >.
<I’m an old fashioned continental European!>
A finite clause (i.e. one having a tensed verb) may be separated from its neighbour by a boundary colon, semicolon, dash or comma ( : ; – , ):
<If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.>
A non-finite phrase may be separated from its neighbour by a boundary dash or comma:
<Lately we have been doing quite a bit – intervening in foreign countries and destroying the environment.>
Sometimes in pairs:
<You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books.>
The comma < , > or stroke < / > separate structurally equivalent items in lists:
<I am rather perceived as some dark, ominous, plotting, political manipulator, a role I enjoy immensely and like very much.>
Particularly in postal addresses:
<Churchill Road, Bicester, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom OX26 4XT>
And to separate initial adjuncts:
<Here, I violently disagree.>
A word is separated from its neighbour by spaces:
<We_know_very_well_some_things,_but _we_don't_really_believe_in_them.>
A word may be joined to its neighbour to get a compound word:
<The re-focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict.>
Proper nouns or adjectives and a small set of words like Monday start with an initial capital letter:
<… apart from left-radical Keynesians like Paul Krugman, with whom I’m sympathetic…>
Some morpheme suffixes are joined to their neighbours by a relational apostrophe:
<Today’s racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference.>
Some omitted letters are replaced with an apostrophe:
< I’m an old Hegelian.>
<MR. M.F. LEE BDS (UNIV. OF NCL.)>
Two meanings of <St.> (more)In British style, the single quotation mark < ’ ‘>, in American style the double quotation mark < ” “ >, signify direct quotation. Quotation within quotation uses the opposite type of quotation mark for the style, i.e. double marks for British style, single for American.
<’I hate the position of “beautiful soul”, which is: “I remain outside, in a safe place; I don't want to dirty my hands.”‘>
Brackets may also enclose virtually any grammatical unit.
<What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer …>
Halliday (1985) Punctuation categories
boundary markers show grammatical units, for example word spaces:
<Air tragedy city in mourning>
versus
<Airtragedycityinmourning>
status markers show the function of units, for instance question marks:
<How could this happen again?>
relation markers show links between units, for example apostrophes:
<At 95 he's gardening's grand old man.>
