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They — Messrs Foster, Crockett and Porter — had been used to make surgical instruments, which were what she would now require. (R. MACAULAY) And the factory section which lay opposite the small city — across the Mohawk — was little more than a red and gray assemblage of buildings with here and there a smoke-slack projecting upward, and connected with the city by two bridges — a dozen blocks apart — one of them directly at his depot, a wide traffic bridge across which traveled a car-line following the curves of Central Avenue, dotted here and there with stores and small houses. (DREISER) There are two pairs of dashes here: the first pair consisting of the dash after city and the one after the Mohawk, and the second consisting of the dash after bridges and the one after apart. That they really are pairs, and not merely a chance accumulation of dashes, is shown by grammatical and lexical features of the sentence, namely, for the first pair of dashes, by the fact that if we omit the words enclosed by the dashes, across the Mohawk, the sentence will lose a closer definition of the site of the factory section described, but will not be changed in any
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other way: in fact the words across the Mohawk give a more exact description of the site, as characterised by the preceding text (opposite the small city). The phrase across the Mohawk is a loose adverbial modifier. As to the second pair of dashes, it clearly encloses a loose attribute to the noun bridges, the distance between them being stated to be a dozen blocks. In that case, too, if the words a dozen blocks apart are dropped, the distance between the two bridges will be unknown, but the structure of the sentence will not be otherwise changed.
In other cases two dashes, though they may be close to each other, do not form a pair, and this again becomes clear from grammatical and semantic considerations. Let us take an example from Galsworthy: All I meant was that when you tell me a thing is going to cost so much, I like to — well, in fact, I — like to know where I am. That these two dashes do not form a pair is clear from the fact that we cannot drop the words standing between them without getting an inadmissible text: All I meant was that when you tell me a thing is going to cost so much, I like to like to know where I am. So each of the two dashes has to be taken as a separate unit, and in fact, in this sentence each of them expresses a stopping, or hesitation on the part of the speaker.
In a similar way, we must find out whether two commas form a pair or not. Here is an example of two commas forming a pair: He looked rather dirty and stupid, and even as much flaminess as that of the young cock, which he had tied by the leg, would never glow in him. (LAWRENCE) If we drop the words between the comma which comes after cock and the one which comes after leg, we shall lose a characteristic of the cock (indeed, these words form a subordinate attributive clause), and the text would run on without them. Thus the two correlative commas are vised to single out a certain element in the sentence (a subordinate clause).
The same may be said about two commas forming a pair in the following sentence: Life had worn him down on one side, till, like that family of which he was the head, he had lost balance. (GALSWORTHY) The words like that family of which he was the head, consisting of a prepositional phrase and a subordinate attributive clause, may be dropped, and the result would be the loss of additional information based upon a comparison between "him" (Old Jolyon Forsyte) and his family: the sentence would run on: Life had worn him down on one side till he had lost balance.
In other cases, again, two commas within a sentence may have nothing to do with each other, as in this example: His features were wide and flattened, and he had prominent, pale eyes... (MAUGHAM) The comma after flattened and the comma after prominent are not in any way connected with each other, the words standing
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b etween them do not form any sort of syntactical unit, and they could not be safely dropped without damaging the syntactical structure of the sentence, as will be seen from the following experiment: His features were wide and flattened pale eyes, which is not grammatically tenable. Indeed the two commas perform quite different functions here: the comma after flattened marks off the first clause of the compound sentence from its second clause, while the one after prominent serves to separate from each other two homogeneous attributes (prominent and pale) to the word eyes.
The number of single commas, that is, commas not connected with one another, is probably much greater than that of commas going in pairs.
The remaining punctuation marks never form pairs. For instance, semicolons, though of course there may be two or three or more of them Within a sentence, never combine into pairs.
Let us take a sentence with two semicolons in it: We must pass over De Quincey, whose romantic prose, as in the Mail Coach and the Opium Eater, is infused with the imaginative quality of a dream consciousness; Lamb, with his gentle, whimsical Elia; Hazlitt, whose high spirits and easy-flowing style in My First Acquaintance with the Poets belie his assurance that he found writing so hard. (NORTON)
The same may be said about colons: they never go in pairs either, and it must be added that we seldom find more than one colon in a sentence.
Punctuation marks forming pairs always single out some separate part of the sentence. This may be either a loose secondary part, or a subordinate clause, or a parenthesis, or, last not least, an insertion. We will briefly consider some examples. A number of young English poets — brought up, no doubt, to the notes of Henley's anthology, Lyra Heroica — were either killed during the World War or died while it was going on. (CHADBURN) The two dashes single out a loose attribute, and the first two commas a parenthesis. James Elroy Flecker was a more original poet. Though his poems are usually romantic — The Golden Journey to Samarkand, the prologue to his Eastern play, Hassan, might serve as a general title to them all — he is less oracular than Tennyson, less copious and more self-critical. (CHADBURN) The inserted clause coming in between a subordinate clause of concession and the main clause is marked off by dashes.
Now, whether the portion of the sentence enclosed between two commas, or two dashes, or parentheses, is a loose part, or a subordinate clause, or an insertion, has of course to be determined by careful study of the text and even that may sometimes fail to give a completely certain result.
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