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grammar update
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Randall-Holmes committed Jan 8, 2025
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Expand Up @@ -414,13 +414,13 @@ \subsection{Pauses and word boundaries}

The special characters \verb|`| (called ``backquote") and \verb|~| (called ``tilde") act as an alternative word break. It must be followed by a consonant, it cannot be expressed as a pause, and it does have the effect of ending a word. We also call this the interverbal hyphen. The backquote is the preferred shape; but we processed and parsed a lot of old text with the tilde, so it is still supported.

Whitespace is sometimes an explicit pause and sometimes a word boundary which is not marked by any actual phonetic feature. Where whitespace does not appear, one should not pause. Where a pause is allowed at whitespace, a comma should always be permitted (The old parser LIP does not always support this, but we regard this as debugging, not a novelty). There are situations where whitespace is allowed due to a word break but an actual comma pause would change the parse (and so in speech such a whitespace is not expressible as a pause).\footnote{There are such instances of whitespace which are permitted to be written but cannot represent a pause, in connection with the handling of the legacy forms of the APA connectives. I should look into whether the tilde can be used in these contexts; it would make more sense.}
Whitespace is sometimes an explicit pause and sometimes a word boundary which is not marked by any actual phonetic feature. Where whitespace does not appear, one should not pause. Where a pause is allowed at whitespace, a comma should always be permitted (The old parser LIP does not always support this, but we regard this as debugging, not a novelty). There are situations where whitespace is allowed due to a word break but an actual comma pause would change the parse (and so in speech such a whitespace is not expressible as a pause).\footnote{There are such instances of whitespace which are permitted to be written but cannot represent a pause, in connection with the handling of the legacy forms of the APA connectives. I should look into whether the interverbal hyphen can be used in these contexts; it would make more sense.}

Vowel initial words are always preceded by a pause if they are not at the start of a text or utterance. Consonant final words are always followed by a pause if they are not at the end of a text or utterance. Thus, whitespace preceded by a consonant or whitespace followed by a vowel must represent an actual pause. So we also regard whitespace preceded by consonants or followed by vowels
as an explicit pause. It appears to be a new observation not attested before 2013 that we must pause before the first in a stream of VV words, but it is also clearly necessary, as experiments with phonetic transcripts have revealed.\footnote{The new PEG implementation supports the traditional requirements
that pauses at the end of a serial name and pauses before a logical connective must be actual comma pauses. Some logical connectives are consonant-initial: there is a purely phonetic description of the front of a logical connective in the PEG.}

We note the subtle point that the end of a predicate word may have to be indicated by whitespace or tilde if the stressed syllable is not explicitly marked. So in this case the whitespace or tilde may have no local phonetic meaning but will have the definite phonetic effect of signalling the presence of an earlier stressed syllable. In phonetic transcripts, where whitespace not representing pauses is suppressed, the stresses in predicate words must usually be marked explicitly.
We note the subtle point that the end of a predicate word may have to be indicated by whitespace or interverbal hyphen (backquote or tilde) if the stressed syllable is not explicitly marked. So in this case the whitespace or interverbal hyphen may have no local phonetic meaning but will have the definite phonetic effect of signalling the presence of an earlier stressed syllable. In phonetic transcripts, where whitespace not representing pauses is suppressed, the stresses in predicate words must usually be marked explicitly.

There are special conventions associated with the cmapua {\bf ci}: whitespace following it should not be expressed as a pause unless the following word is vowel-initial (in which case phonetics demands a pause) or the following word is a Loglan name word (in which case a pause is required, though only whitespace may appear). This has to do with the fact that {\bf ci} is a name marker, but only when it is followed by a pause; this stipulation guards many occurrences of {\bf ci} which have nothing to do with names from having to follow the phonetic rules for name markers.

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