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A room furnished comfortably and tastefully, but not extravagantly.

Is there any special name for this comma before 'but' and will the sentence work if we don't use it?

Barmar
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Vedansh
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    It's optional. If you would pause before "but" then include the comma - it might depend how you were bracketing it, i.e. "(comfortably and tastefully) but not extravagantly" or "comfortably and (tastefully but not extravagantly)". Is there more likely to be a contrast between extravagantly and tastefully than extravagantly and comfortably? I wonder. No idea if it has a name. – Stuart F Feb 15 '24 at 09:32
  • Make sense, thanks! – Vedansh Feb 15 '24 at 13:59
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    https://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/punctuation/comma/summary has a taxonomy of commas. I think this would fall under "bracketing comma". – Barmar Feb 15 '24 at 19:43
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    Does this answer your question? Which type of comma is used here? (' Bracketing commas can appear as a pair to enclose an interruption in the middle of a sentence. They can also appear alone to separate an interruption at the start or end of a sentence. They serve to add more information to sentences that are complete.') Here, the noun/determiner phrase is extended. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 15 '24 at 23:19

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University of Sussex has a Summary of Commas that describes four general types of commas. This use is an example of bracketing comma:

Bracketing commas always come in pairs, unless one of them would come at the beginning or the end of the sentence, and they always set off a weak interruption which could in principle be removed from the sentence:

In your example it's not in a pair, but that's because the phrase being bracketed is at the end of the sentence. The bracketed phrase "but not extravagantly" can be sensibly removed from the sentence.

Barmar
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