all Slavic: parenthetical dashes

G

Gavril

Senior Member
English, USA
Consider the following examples:


1) In 1987, Chrysler turned its components division, Acustar, into a wholly-owned subsidiary.

2) In 1987, Chrysler turned its components division – Acustar – into a wholly-owned subsidiary.

3) In 1987, Chrysler turned its components division – Acustar, into a wholly-owned subsidiary.


According to standard English writing conventions, the first option is stylistically preferable (usually), but both 1 and 2 are grammatical and convey more-or-less the same information.

However, option 3 is ungrammatical and incorrect.


What are the Slavic languages' stances on this?

Based on my review of certain texts that were originally written in a Slavic language, I gather that for at least some Slavic languages, option 3 works equally well, and would be understood in the same way as 1 and 2.

Thanks for any information,
Gavril
 
    • In Polish it would go like in English.

    But the correct interpunction is not top priority, many people do not put attention to it, don't care or even don't know. Even the spell checkers are unreliable with this respect and often want to place commas in random places.
     
    Awwal12 said:
    In Russian it's much like in English. 1 and 2 work, 3 doesn't.
    Click to expand...
    ... Probably because they mark different types of selection in the first place. My impression is that in Russian such dashes signal the fragments ending in a high pitch, while with commas there are segment-final drops by default.
     
    Awwal12 said:
    ... Probably because they mark different types of selection in the first place. My impression is that in Russian such dashes signal the fragments ending in a high pitch, while with commas there are segment-final drops by default.
    Click to expand...

    Do you mean "final-segment" drops? I.e., the final segment (of the last parenthetical word) has a dropped pitch?
     
    Indeed the basic difference is that the comma-decorated annotation would have roughly the same intonation pattern as the preceding entity (so these sound not so far from an enumeration - and actually they are as the meanings are trivially added together to form a single complex), while the dashed one would oppose in pitch and most probably have prolonged gaps - as its purpose is to draw attention to the annotation as representing something special like "treat it as not an attribute but rather a predicate".
     
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