Since the early 1980s, linguistics has been dealing with writing as an autonomous subsystem of the language system. However, punctuation has not been adequately integrated into the newly emerging questions in this context. Ursula Bredel's study reconstructs punctuation independently of the norm from formal, distributional, and functional perspectives. From a formal perspective, the structure of individual signs is examined; from a distributional perspective, graphotactic regularities are described; and from a functional perspective, the reading process control of punctuation marks is reconstructed. Based on this, form-function groups are isolated that represent the relevant marking structures for word, sentence, and text reading, with each form feature and each distribution feature being accounted for.