La punteggiatura “generosa” di Anna Felder, e il mistero della magnolia di Lugano

Abstract

 I welcomed this appreciated invitation to contribute to this miscellany in memory of Anna Felder to ideally continue a dialogue with her that we had been carrying on for months – I as a linguist, she as an exquisite writer attentive to stylistic detail –, and to ideally make that further planned phone call that never actually took place. I would like to show more accurately Anna Felder’s idea of punctuation and look for the ways she actually implemented that by leafing through her pages. To her, punctuation is a “generous” device that allows to enrich and modulate the meanings imposed by lexicon and syntax, thoroughly breaking the rules dictated by grammatical tradition.