ABSTRACT
One origin lies in the grammatical tradition, which for more than a millennium has been largely content to analyse marks of punctuation by function, as elocutionary, a rhetorical guide to pauses; syntactic, a grammatical guide to syntax. The exclamation mark came from Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia in the 1360s, the lunula or round bracket from Colluccio Salutati in the 1390s, and the semicolon from Pietro Bembo in the 1490s, all three marks being disseminated primarily in print as a part of Aldine and Bembine founts. One would expect the intensive work on semiotics and all manner of signification to have noticed the lacuna, and filled it; but the debt of modern literary and linguistic theory to Saussurian linguistics leaves it peculiarly blind to punctuation. In one aspect Oxford English Dictionary's 'fig has the right of it: to extend the concept of punctuation to the way in which letters punctuate the whiteness of the page is to redefine punctuation.
