On the Rules for the Syntactic Comma in Slovenski pravopis 2001

Abstract

The article poits out some weakness in the treatment of the rules for the placement of the comma. It lists plain omissions and errors, e.g., incongruence between the content of the orthographic rule and the example illustrating the rule; the controversial definition of the apposition, which corresponds only to a limited example; terminological laxity, e.g., in grammatical terminology, where semi-sentence and semi-predicative attribute are confused, etc. - The article also presents a proposal for a more comprehensive formulation of the rules on the use of the comma before the subordinating conjuntion preden. To improve the rules on the use of the comma,two new terms are suggested (right-directional and left-directional comma), which not only dispense with the imprecise formulations of the rules for using the comma (e.g., "if the intermediate sentence requires a comma"), but also better cover the fact that the syntactic comma marks a specific syntactic relationship, thus providing the addressee with the information about the actual point in the linear course of the communicative string, which is important for understanding written textual units.