The Rise and Fall of the Semicolon

Jacques Durrenmatt, The Rise and Fall of the Semicolon The depletion of the use of the semicolon is mainly due to the difficulty it meets, since the failure of the periodic model, to justify its specificity against the comma and the colon. Once understood why the need of a proliferation of median signs arose in the Renaissance when the comma seemed to be enough, is studied in a second time how the grammarians who were interested in punctuation have worked, till the grammatical normalization in the nineteenth century, to clarify the differences and to include a hierarchy between semicolon and colon. There were precise reasons relative to a certain idea of the period and, more broadly, of the text, as an organized entity. These were, at the same time, indicative of the indecision that affected and is still affecting the thinking of the autonomy of the internal syntactic units in respect of a larger one defined semantically rather than enunciatively.