Francisco Alonso Almeida

Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

The Punctuation of Medieval English Medical Recipes

As already known, the lack of punctuation conventions to establish clearly reading pauses in texts seems to be a shibboleth in medieval writings. In the case of medical recipes, punctuation is mainly achieved through certain linguistic mechanisms rather than through conventionalised punctuation marks. In this study, my main objective is, precisely, to analyse those linguistic mechanisms which allow the division of written material within the medieval medical recipe. For this purpose, the concept of "standardisation of arrangement" proposed in Görlach (1992: 746) is applied in order to identify the different sections in which the recipe-text is organised.