THE ABSENCE OF PUNCTUATION & THE PRESENCE OF READERS IN THE MATEJA MATEVSKI’S POETRY

Abstract

Punctuation shapes how one’s texts are read and understood. Punctuation marks, in poetry, serve as a key concept that gives structure, meaning, and leads the reader through the interpretation process. This research aims to answer the question: Does the absence of punctuation marks in Mateja Matevski’s poetry have an impact on the reader’s reading process and interpretation. The purpose of this study is to perceive the effect that poetry, written without punctuation, has on the readers. The research is quantitative, and the sample is a selection of poems, mostly from the poetry collection “Kopnezh po celina” (“Longing for Entirety”, 2005), which means that a corpus was compiled for the needs of the research. The selection of poems is based on the absence of punctuation. The research relies on a combined content analysis based on the coding of the responses. The results of the research show that the absence of punctuation has a linguistic, interpretative, cognitive, and emotional impact on readers.