Stephan Stiller wrote: >> I sometimes have a closing dash and sometimes not > > And let's not forget that one often has what is semantically a pair of > parenthetical dashes, either the opening or the closing component of which is > eaten up by the beginning or the end of the sentence, resp. These punctuation > rules are rarely made explicit, if ever – but they are pervasively applied. > > (And, replace "--" by "–" in my prev email.)
These sorts of "absorption" rules are discussed in great detail in Geoffrey Nunberg's "The Linguistics of Punctuation", which I highly recommend for anyone interested in this and related issues. http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Linguistics_of_Punctuation.html?id=Sh-sruuKjJwC - John Burger MITRE
