Una aproximación a la puntuación castellana en los siglos XVII y XVIII

Abstract

This study aims to describe and analyze the system(s) used by Spanish notars to punctuate texts over a period of 100 years. In order to achieve this, the author selects a number of texts from the corpus CODEA+ 2015, an online corpus of archival documents in Spanish writ-ten before 1800 and transcribed by the GITHE research group of the Uni-versity of Alcalá, which contains today more than 2100 documents. Due to the number of Spanish provinces that CODEA covers, we will focus on two that are at the center of the peninsula, Madrid and Guadalajara, so that the corpus of the study is more homogeneous. Likewise, although chronologically CODEA covers a very broad period, from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, the selected texts will belong to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth. In this way, the lines of research that we intend to continue with this work are to analyze the punctuation marks that are used at this time, their distribution and their value, and if they are the same as the current ones or if there is a variety and an idiosyncratic punctuation. In short, it is about offering a description as systematic as possible of the punctuation system used in these Castilian texts of the sev-enteenth and eighteenth centuries, not only to better understand the rules that govern the use of these elements in those centuries, but also to pro-vide data with which to compare them in subsequent studies.