PUNCTUATION AND SYNTACTIC PECULIARITIES OF AN ENGLISH INFORMATIONАL TEXT

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the study of punctuation and syntactic specifics of the informational text. The IELTS exam text for reading has been taken as an example of this kind of text for analysis. It has been highlighted that historically punctuation marks were used to facilitate reading written text aloud, but over time their use has been more and more determined by the logical and semantic relations among the words in a sentence. It is claimed that the specifics of the relation between punctuation rules and syntactic peculiarities of the sentences can be described as mutually complementary: since there are few strict rules for the use of punctuation marks in the English language, it is precisely knowledge of the specifics of the syntactic structure of English sentences that helps learners of English divide the sentences into logical sense units while reading the text thus ensuring its comprehension. It has been established that the punctuation features of the text analyzed in this paper include the use of the Oxford comma in sentences with homogeneous members. There is a significant number of participial phrases in the analyzed text, which are not separated by commas, even within long subject groups with dependent words. This may be considered an example of how English punctuation norms differ from Ukrainian. Commas in the analyzed text are not used before subordinate conjunctions, which is a norm in English. The text mostly consists of simple extended sentences with participial phrases and homogeneous members of the sentence. As a result of establishing the syntactic and punctuation features of the informational text, the paper substantiates the idea that it is necessary to pay special attention to the syntactic structure of the sentences at the advanced stages of learning English, since punctuation will not always help the Ukrainian reader to decode the written text quickly. This is especially relevant when studying the Communicative Course of English or English for Academic Purposes at the second and third levels of higher education.