Étude comparée du fonctionnement des parenthèses et des tirets

Abstract

This study investigates the functional equivalence of brackets and dashes. Both signs seem to mark “the operation of typographic uncoupling” (Pétillon-Boucheron, 2003). Our corpus study clearly shows, however, that their uses differ. While brackets can always replace dashes, the reverse is not true. Brackets have specific uses both on the enunciative level (marking someone else’s speech) and with respect to the semantics or syntax (marking items below the word, greater than or equal to the sentence). In addition, while brackets are always double, the closing dash is “erased” before a strong punctuation mark. We attempt to explain this difference in their operation by a difference in their positions in the punctuation system. We argue that dashes are sentential signs (whose scope is strictly below the sentence) while brackets are enunciation signs, i.e. signs that can range over all levels of textual organization (from characters to paragraphs).

Keywords

• brackets
• graphic variants
• metadiscursive marking
• parenthetic dash
• punctuation