牛津逗號

在英语書寫中，连续逗号（又稱牛津逗号、哈佛逗号）是指在三个或更多的名詞中，在倒數第二个名詞之后添加逗号。例如有三个国家可能以這樣的方式寫下 "法国，意大利和西班牙"（France, Italy and Spain），此時没有连續逗号，而當寫成 "法国，意大利，和西班牙"（France, Italy, and Spain）時，意大利後面那個逗號就是連續逗號The terms Oxford comma and Harvard comma come from 牛津大學出版社 and 哈佛大学出版社, where serial-comma use is the 格式指南.The serial comma sometimes refers to any of the separator commas in a list, but this is a rare, old-fashioned usage. Herein, the term is used only as defined above.Sometimes, the term also denotes the comma that might come before etc. at the end of a list (see the Australian Government Publishing Service's Style Manual for Authors, Editors, and Printers, below). Such an extension is reasonable, since etc. is the abbreviation of the Latin phrase et cetera (lit. and other things).。

人們對於是否要使用连续逗号有不同的看法，不同地区英语的用法也有所不同。英國英語對牛津逗號沒有強制要求， 而在美国英语中，牛津逗號比較常見，有时甚至要强制使用牛津逗號。就建議大家使用牛津逗號，而牛津逗号名稱也是來自於此。 The Oxford Style Manual, 2002: "The presence or lack of a comma before and or or ... has become the subject of much spirited debate. For a century it has been part of OUP style ..., to the extent that the convention has come to be called the 'Oxford comma'. But it is commonly used by many other publishers here and abroad, and forms a routine part of style in US and Canadian English" (p. 121).

参考文献

Category:標點符號