За българската пунктуация през погледа на студентите-чужденци

The paper discusses the results of dictation and free composition exercises done by foreign students of Bulgarian and checked for punctuation. The results, which were processed by mathematic and statistic methods, prove that punctuation marks faithfully reflect the intonation contours of the utterances in Bulgarian and keep an accurate record of the flow of speech within the written medium. Every punctuation mark is an independent morpheme, carrying its intonational, semantic and stylistic load within the text boundaries. Punctuation has a clearly defined contribution to the meaning of utterances and should enjoy the same rights as the rest of the meaning formatives. Therefore it should be given the same functional status as word-order and the lexico-grammatical phrase-constituents.