---
title: "Old English punctuation revisited — paper by Aguado (2005)"
description: "This study tests that assumption on the West-Saxon Old English Gospel of St Matthew in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College… 28 references."
authors: ["Teresa Marqués Aguado"]
year: 2005
venue: "SELIM 13"
source: "https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/view/13428"
doi: "10.17811/selim.13.2005.47-68"
licence: "CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aguado-2019-old-english-punctuation-revisited-case/"
---
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# Old English punctuation revisited: the case of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew

**Authors:** Teresa Marqués Aguado · **Year:** 2005 · **Venue:** [SELIM 13](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/) ([SELIM Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2005](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/2005/)) · **Publisher:** [University of Oviedo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/university-of-oviedo/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.13.2005.47-68) · [PDF](https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/download/13428/12160) · [DOI 10.17811/selim.13.2005.47-68](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.13.2005.47-68) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W6887869387)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Editors of Old and Middle English texts often treat manuscript punctuation as inconsistent and quietly replace it with modern usage. This study tests that assumption on the West-Saxon Old English Gospel of St Matthew in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 140 (fols. 2r–45v, probably 11th century). The author started from her own annotated edition, in which each word carries a lemma, a morphological tag, a Present-Day English gloss and vowel-length marking. She ran it through the Old English Concordancer (OEC) to extract every punctuation mark with five words of context on each side, then sorted and classified the results by hand. Uses are described on four levels: macro-textual, sentential, clausal and phrasal. The marks turn out to follow fairly regular tendencies. They serve both a rhetorical role, guiding oral and liturgical reading, and a grammatical role, structuring doctrinal content. The paper ends with a table of modern functional equivalents for each use, ranked by frequency. This supports transparent, criteria-based modernization in editions instead of silent replacement.

## Key points
- The marks belong to the *positurae* system: punctus versus (1,053 occurrences), punctus (995) and punctus elevatus (344). The punctus interrogativus does not occur. A paraph section marker, sometimes flagged by a marginal tilde, also appears.
- 25 of the 28 chapters end with a punctus versus, and 11 chapter breaks additionally carry the section marker. The section marker plus tilde introduces a change of topic 6 times.
- Fewer than 40 punctus elevatus (11.62%) occur from chapter 21 onwards. The author reads this as possible evidence of a second hand or a second punctuator.
- The workflow was: annotated corpus → OEC concordance → spreadsheet with one row per instance (left context | mark | right context) → sorting by the first following word → classification.
- No mark maps one-to-one onto a modern sign. Each use instead receives one or more Present-Day English counterparts, based on Quirk et al. and Truss. Some uses map to no punctuation at all (Ø).

## Interesting ideas
- Split each concordance hit into left context, mark and right context, then sort by the word after the mark so that instances of the same use cluster together for fast manual labelling.
- Treat the mapping between two notation systems as many-to-many, listing candidate equivalents per function ranked by frequency, with "no mark" as a legitimate output.
- Mark vowel length in the annotation so that homographic minimal pairs are told apart before any counting starts.
- Watch how often a single feature appears across sections of one document, since a sudden drop can reveal a change of scribe or source.
- Analyse one mark separately at macro-textual, sentence, clause and phrase level, because the same sign does different jobs at each level.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): the same keyword-in-context sort could speed up error analysis of punctuation attachments where witness parsers disagree, grouping similar failures for repair-rule induction.
- **I2** (tree): UD dialect conversion could use ranked, context-conditioned label mappings with an explicit "drop" option instead of a fixed one-to-one table.
- **I3** (tokens): attaching a disambiguating feature to known homograph pairs early would keep lemma and tag statistics from merging distinct words.
- **I4** (learn): tracking per-section feature distributions in training or silver data could flag segments produced by a different annotator or converter.
- **I5** (back): generation could choose punctuation by asking which structural level a boundary belongs to, rather than using one rule per mark.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Teresa Marqués Aguado. 2005. Old English punctuation revisited: the case of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. SELIM 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{aguado2005old,
  title = {{Old English punctuation revisited: the case of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew}},
  author = {Teresa Marqués Aguado},
  booktitle = {SELIM 13},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.13.2005.47-68},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.13.2005.47-68}
}
```

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## References

28 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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15. Miranda García, A., J. Calle Martín & D. Moreno Olalla 2006: The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the light of the Old English Concordancer. In Renouf, A & A. Kehoe eds. The changing face of corpus linguistics. Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York: 81-98. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401201797_008)
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*Updated 24 October 2026*