The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Nothing can tell you how often an “and” will appear in a list—that's impossible, since you can extend the chain endlessly—that's what I meant. And before the first “and,” they don’t know if an “and” will appear at all: I buy houses—there’s no indication whether an “and” will appear or not.

Again, the proper parsing of lists in the spoken language is no sweat to native Chinese speakers because of the semantics, general frequency of usage, and clues like stress, tempo, pauses, etc.  that help parse lists properly.  Analogs using English words and mock Chinese syntax:

• apples cherries sweet nutritious -- the meanings of the words by themselves imply the parsing as apples and cherries are sweet and nutritious
  
• rich famous life -- the common idiom is recognized and implies the parsing lives of the rich and famous
  
• water air oil gas liquid -- if pronounced water, air, oil: gas, liquid the parsing is perceived to be water and air and oil are gases and liquids
  

But to a non-native speaker that is used to connecting list items with "wa-" or "et", those phrases, written without punctuation, would be hard to parse.  Not impossible, just not automatic.

So how is a "Sh" at the beginning of the word supposed to know that an “and” follows?

It doesn't.  See my previous post.  

What is probably happening is that some words that happen to start with "sh" happen to be common in the lists of conditions and benefits that comprise the bulk of the SBJ entries. 

If that is the case, and if qo is indeed a "wa"-like connective added by the Author to help parsing the lists,  you will see an excess of word-initial "sh" before words that start with "qo".  Not because the "sh" glyph attracts the initial "qo".