Sõnadevahelised

Sõnadevahelised is a term used in Estonian linguistics to describe phenomena that occur at the boundary between words in a sentence. The concept encompasses a variety of elements that influence how word boundaries are realized in writing and in speech. In a broad sense, sõnadevahelised can refer to orthographic features such as punctuation marks, spacing patterns, and hyphenation, as well as syntactic or prosodic features that affect segmentation between adjacent words.

In practice, scholars apply the term to discuss how texts are divided into words and how readers and listeners interpret boundaries. Different languages show different patterns of sõnadevahelised, with some requiring explicit marks of separation between words and others relying on word-internal morphology or prosody to signal boundaries. In Estonian, as in many languages, rules of punctuation and hyphenation directly influence the realized boundary between words in written text, while speech often uses intonation and pauses to convey the same separations.

In language technology and corpus research, sõnadevahelised are important for tasks such as word boundary detection, tokenization, and spacing normalization. The term thus serves as a catch-all for studying and modelling phenomena at word edges, bridging orthography, syntax, and phonology.

See also: word boundary, interword spacing, punctuation, tokenization.