The Punctuation in Documents Of New Spain. A Descriptive Look

Abstract

The punctuation’s history during the Colonial period has few studies. Thus Juan Martínez Marín (1992) barely alludes to them, just like the paleography’s manuals. Ramón Santiago in 1998 makes a very complete presentation of the most outstanding grammarians and orthographies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing the role of orthography and punctuation in those centuries.

 Reviewing the Orthographia of López de Velasco (1582) we found that he is one of the first grammarians to dedicate a ‘second part’ of his study to detail the mark. He declares that it is of great importance to know how to punctuate a text, and although he considers that it is more important to punctuate a printed text, he states that is also important for handwriting. This study presents a description of the punctuation marks used in the seven documents of the sixteenth century, with different diatopic and register, based mainly on the uses that this author refers.

 Among uses are identified as prosodic, syntactic and semantic type: indicate pause to breathe, separate clauses, oppose content, introduce explanatory, indicate the beginning and end of the period. It looks at a greater variety of signs in formal documents, with forms and uses common to Spain and New Spain, with the preference of the function over form.