Question: Information: - Quotation marks, also called quotes, quote marks, quotemarks, speech marks, inverted commas or talking marks, are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character. - The semicolon or semi-colon ( ; ) is a punctuation mark that separates major sentence elements . A semicolon can be used between two closely related independent clauses , provided they are not already joined by a coordinating conjunction . Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate items in a list , particularly when the elements of that list contain commas . The first printed semicolon was the work of the Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder in 1494 . Manutius established the practice of using the semicolon to separate words of opposed meaning and to allow a rapid change in direction in connecting interdependent statements . Ben Jonson was the first notable English writer to use the semicolon systematically . The modern uses of the semicolon relate either to the listing of items or to the linking of related clauses . In Unicode it is encoded at U +003B ; semicolon ( HTML ; ) . - The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in various languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight but inclined from the vertical, or with the appearance of a small, filled-in number nine. - Punctuation is "the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and the correct reading, both silently and aloud, of handwritten and printed texts." Another description is: "The practice, action, or system of inserting points or other small marks into texts, in order to aid interpretation; division of text into sentences, clauses, etc., by means of such marks." - In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. A typical clause consists of a subject and a predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase, a verb with any objects and other modifiers. However, the subject is sometimes not expressed, often the case in null-subject languages if the subject is retrievable from context, but it sometimes also occurs in other languages such as English (as in imperative sentences and non-finite clauses). After reading the paragraphs above, we are interested in knowing the entity with which 'semicolon' exhibits the relationship of 'instance of'. Find the answer from the choices below. Choices: - clause - description - grammar - null - phrase - practice - predicate - proposition - punctuation - punctuation marks - text - understanding - verb
Answer:
punctuation marks