Die diachrone Entwicklung des Gedankenstrichs vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts

Abstract This article focuses on the development of a punctation mark that has hardly been the focus of historical linguistics so far: the dash. On the basis of a corpus analysis of printed texts, an insight into the quantitative and qualitative development of the dash since the end of the 18th century will be given. On the one hand, I argue that the dash has been used since the end of the 18th century in contexts that also characterize it in contemporary German. On the other hand, I want to show that the read-controlling function of the dash, as assumed by Bredel (2002, 2008), already underlies some of its early uses.