In a punctuation system the rights and duties" are peculiar to each punctuation mark ". The dash in the Russian writing appeared at the end of the XVIII century and in the 19th century became one of the most functionally saturated punctuation marks which wins positions in syntactic designs more and more.
Dash – the universal sign what width its uses testifies to. Despite this, there are regularities of its application. First of all, the dash is the fixer of "grammatical admissions" which is structurally filling blank spaces i.e. with its help the semantic relations between words in a syntactic design are established and also its structure is specified ("Kiev – the capital of Ukraine", "They went to the street, and it – home"). In the conjunctionless offer by means of this sign its parts can be divided ("Ivan pulled the trigger – the revolver misfired"). In addition it is used at division of remarks of dialogue, differentiation of the direct speech and the words of the author, the Dash transfers on the letter the special semantic relations – conditional-temporal ("On the street snowfall – it is impossible to leave"), investigative ("The youth left – at evening it became uninteresting"), protivopostavitelny ("Knowledge of regulations is not desirable – surely"). By means of a dash the written language gains emotional and expressional qualities, i.e. the intonational rupture of a phrase which creates sharpness and tension is created ("In silence someone is scraped, it seemed to me – a mouse"). According to linguists, practice of the broad use of a dash instead of other punctuation marks, for example a colon, speaks about a possibility of the choice of the new vigorous and expressional sign. The choice is defined also by the nature of the text, a statement manner, an author's habit. The importance of this punctuation mark in the modern text is very high, now it is much more difficult than its function, than in last centuries since the dash acts in the offer not only as the razlichitel (though the big smyslorazlichitelny part is assigned to it), but also serves speech economy. The dash demands to itself respect, the chaotic use of this sign often leads to change of semantic coloring.