PUNCTUATION OF THE "SPEAKER" AND PUNCTUATION OF THE "LISTENER": ONOMASIOLOGICAL AND THE SEMASIOLOGICAL APPROACH IN PUNCTUATION

The article proposes to use the distinction between onomasiological and semasiological approaches in the Russian punctuation study. The semasiological approach, which dominates in grammar and vocabulary studies, is on the sidelines in the description of punctuation. This is due primarily to the dominance of the normative approach in Russian punctuation theory, which focuses on the writer and considers punctuation practice to be equal to a set of punctuation decisions approved by the norm. The researchers and punctuation compilers primarily use onomasiological approach in arranging and formulating the punctuation rules: they present conditions of communication, semantics, grammatical structure and / or lexical content of the context to be the “given” (topic, theme), and information about the prescribed / recommended punctuation mark — in the end, as the “new” (comment, rheme). To go beyond the normative uses of punctuation marks, we need to apply a semasiological (descriptive) approach, which requires understanding the functionality of a punctuation mark. In the framework of this approach, the diversity of text structures causes the plurality of interpretations appears; also, at least constructive, communicative and semantic aspects are distinguished there. One can consider a nonnormative punctuation mark to be a way to solve a problem of expressing the information structure of the sentence, i.e. to separate syntactically independent components from each other or to divide a sentence into sintagmas, rather than to assume that it is an error.