Relative clauses and the comma in school exams over the last 100 years

Linguistic and didactic statements regarding the punctuation of relative clauses are sometimes contradictory: at times, such structures are considered particularly straightforward to comprehend; at other times, they are described as significant learning obstacles. This article takes up these varying assessments and provides a corpus-based description of the actual punctuation practices of school graduates. It becomes evident that the frequency of opening and closing commas in relative clauses varies depending on the connection and syntactic context. Overall, this suggests an approach to punctuation instruction that focuses more on syntactic structures than on signaling units.