Pontuação em Impressos Renascentistas: O Surgimento da Sentença Ortográfica

Abstract

Which principIes used"to guide the punctuation ofthe Portuguese language when there were no Portuguese grammars, but, as nowadays, there was already a printing activity which made available texts in this language to a great amount of people? The most simple answer to this question is that they were available in those Latin grammars in use. We have tried to demonstrate, based on the study of two marks of punctuation in use at that time - the comma and the colon - that this answer must be better elaborated: the solution the printing houses carne to was not only to transfer the established principIes for the Latin grammar into Portuguese, but to restructure them to the Portuguese language, which supported the appearence of a new unit in the writing system: the ortographic sentence.