L’uso della virgola nei testi di allievi delle scuole medie

Abstract

This paper investigates the actual use of the comma in texts of Swiss middle-school students with Italian as their first language. Based on recent punctuation studies about the Italian language, we first distinguish between a syntactic and a textual use of the comma. The analysis of 60 student papers then reveals that the learner’s main punctuation problems are not due to syntactic reasons but to textual reasons: the students struggle with organizing and hierarchizing their thoughts within the text.

Keywords

• Syntactic vs. Textual Comma
• Information Structure
• Utterance Boundaries
• Punctuation Problems
• School Essays