Punctuation marks have special importance in bringing out the meaning of a text.
Geoffrey Nunberg's 1990 monograph bridged the gap between descriptive treatments of punctuation and prescriptive accounts, by spelling out the features of a text-grammar for the orthographic sentence. Several grammars incorporating punctuation were then shown to reduce failures and ambiguities in parsing. In Section 2, we examine how dashes act as typographical cues for the information structure in written English. An Information-Based Approach to Punctuation. The Computational Analysis of English - Garside, Leech et al.