Thus, while matters of style are formally distinguished from syntax in the study of languages, they are neverthless linked closely together in classical Chinese, making many sentences difficult to understand even in context. (At times it makes them easier: style, especially parallelism, can at times indicate the best syntactic reading of a passage). Overall—especially with its lack of inflections—the language can be said to be “syntactically overdetermined” in that there may well be a number of grammatically possible ways of interpreting a syntactically generated sentence (Fuller 1999: 2; Karlgren 1962). In a number of cases more than one reading will be consistent with the context of the section, and/or the entire text. This situation is exacerbated by the lack of punctuation in early classical Chinese: no periods, colons, semi-colons, dashes, commas, or parentheses were inserted into texts until much later, and both then and now you can get very different readings of a text depending on where you place a comma and/or a period (for example: “John thought Marsha was a fool”; “John, thought Marsha, was a fool”). The written language compensates in part for the lack of punctuation marks by the use of “function words”, graphs that have little or no meaning on their own, but serve as grammatical instructions: zhe, 者, for example, usually nominalizes what precedes it; ye, 也, is a phrase-final marker; hu, 乎, concludes sentences to be read interrogatively; and so on. A few other graphs serve as both function words and meaning words. The graph zhi, 之, is a sign of the genitive. Unfortunately for easy reading, it can also be used as a pronoun, and as another word for “to go”. That is to say, it is not always easy to see the syntactic category into which zhi should be placed in a sentence. Indeed, it has even been maintained that while the focus of language in English is the sentence, in classical Chinese it is context (DeFrancis 1984: 52; Hansen 1992: 34).