Little notice has been taken of punctu- ation in the field of natural language processing, chiefly due to the lack of any coherent theory on which to base implementations. Some work has been carried out concerning punctu- ation and parsing, but much of it seems to have been rather ad-hoc and performance-motivated. This paper describes the first step towards the construction of a theoretically-motivated account of punctuation. Parsed corpora are processed to extract punctuation patterns, which are then checked and generalised to a small set of General Punctuation Rules. Their usage is discussed, and suggestions are made for possible methods of including punctu- ation information in grammars.

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