Reviewing conceptions: Institutionalized discourses about punctuation and its implications for teaching

Abstract

This work considers punctuation as an object of investigation with the aim of exploring institutionalized discourses about the theme in different spaces of social circulation. This work also aims to investigate in what extent these discourses have implications for the teaching of punctuation in the school context. To explore these points, it is carried out a theoretical review of linguistic studies that addresses the issue. This review demonstrates how the complexity involved in punctuation as a language phenomenon, which is relate to its own historical constitution, results in a scenario in which the way of approaching punctation is a reflex of several linguistic perspectives competing. Among these perspectives, it is emphasized four of them, which conceives the punctuation as a graphic mechanism, as a prosodic resource, as a mechanism of legibility and as an enunciative mark. Considering this theoretical discussion, several materials are explored – as official documents on Portuguese language teaching, didactic materials, and internet texts about the theme – to identify how remnants of these perspectives can be noticed by the way punctuation is approached by each material. As a result, it is seen the emergence of conflicting ideas about the role of punctuation marks in the analyzed material. Due to the instability of approaches related to punctuation, it is proposed a discussion about how challenging teaching punctation can be. Finally, it is argued in favor of an enunciative perspective as an approach that considers the complexity involved in punctuation.