ABSTRACT
Ancient discussions of the process of reading indicate that, when a reader was declaiming or reading aloud, he was expected to introduce pauses at the ends of larger structures and certain shorter ones within the paragraph. According to the grammarians these pauses were assigned arbitrary time values, the main feature of which is that they were graded in relation to each other. The discussions in the works of grammarians and rhetoricians reveal two principal attitudes to the analysis of discourse called 'rhetorical' and 'grammatical': the one focused primarily on form, the other on content. Rhetorical analysis is concerned with the rhythm and shape of a discourse. The role of punctuation in Antiquity led naturally to its role in the new situation, when the written manifestation of language had begun to acquire a new status which was more independent of that of its spoken counterpart.
