Difficult cases of punctuation in the tasks of the All-Russian Olympiad of schoolchildren in the Russian language

The article examines those All-Russian Olympiad assignments in the Russian language that include questions on punctuation. It is noted that punctuation as a separate section is not included in the methodological recommendations for compiling Olympiad assignments. There are several reasons accounting for the small number of punctuation Olympiad tasks. Firstly, modern Russian punctuation is variable. Thus, the use of one or another punctuation mark can be determined not only by the main structural-grammatical principle of punctuation, but by the semantic and intonation ones as well. Secondly, the absence of unified prescriptive rules leads to discrepancies in the explanation of a particular punctuation case. Nevertheless, assignments on difficult cases of punctuation are appropriate in the Russian language Olympiad since they are the type of research tasks that form textual analysis skills in the aspect of the norm variation processes.