I have a divorce tag one of whose roles is that for a 'Child'. What I want to write is "He (say) was x years when his parents divorced". Accordingly the child sentence structure reads: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:]<He was [RA:Child] when> his parents divorced<[D]>. <[M]> but the output does not recognise the role so that the resultant sentence is "His parents divorced". His birth date is exact and the divorce references the year. What am I doing wrong? Nick Shelley

Nick, You said, "His birth date is exact and the divorce references the year." TMG won't return a value for [RA:role] when one of the dates is a year only. Also, your sentence is: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:]<He was [RA:Child] when> his parents divorced<[D]>. <[M]> In a sentence for someone with the role Child, it's usually best to avoid using role-based variables such as [RA:Child]. Use the subject-based variables instead: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:]<He was [SA] when> his parents divorced<[D]>. <[M]> When you have more than one person attached to the tag with the role "Child", [RA:Child] will produce a list of ages. If TMG can calculate them. That's usually not what you want. Typically, you want the age of the current person (the subject) only. I also recommend moving the space after the conditional reference for the age inside the conditional reference: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:]<He was [SA] when >his parents divorced<[D]>. <[M]> That will prevent an extra space in the output after the [:TAB:] when the age cannot be calculated. Lastly, you can make the sentence work for either gender as follows: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:]<[SP] was [SA] when >[SPP] parents divorced<[D]>. <[M]> John

I'm relatively new using Second Site, but I've noticed that the output omits a space that is within a conditional reference. I've had to fix that in a number of my sentences. Here's what I would get from the recommended example in the original message: He was 10 whenhis parents divorced. Kay (Offutt) Schmidt Oregon -----Original Message----- John Cardinal via Subject: Re: [TMG] TMG 7.4: including the age of a witness to an event I also recommend moving the space after the conditional reference for the age inside the conditional reference: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:]<He was [SA] when >his parents divorced<[D]>. <[M]> That will prevent an extra space in the output after the [:TAB:] when the age cannot be calculated.

Kay, I am not sure which sentence you mean when you say "recommended example in the original message". I just tested the output of this sentence: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:]<She was [RA:Child] when >her parents divorced<[D]>. In SS, the result was: She was 28 when her parents divorced in January 1850. I also tested this sentence: [:CR:][:CR:][:TAB:]<She was [RA:Child] when> her parents divorced<[D]>. That produced the same output in SS: She was 28 when her parents divorced in January 1850. I also tested that sentence using a year-only date on the event, which triggers the omission of the "She was ..." clause. That produced this output in SS: Her parents divorced in 1850. That had the same number of leading spaces as the prior example. That was a surprise; I thought SS would retain the space after the conditional reference, in addition to the spaces that result from the [:TAB:] code, but it didn't. I think that's a special case where SS removes the space, but I didn't investigate further. There are a few cases where spacing is different between SS and TMG. That's partly due to no explicit rules for how TMG handles spacing. If you have an example where SS produces results different from TMG, please provide a full example: 1 - The TMG sentence structure you used. 2 - The output from a TMG narrative report for that sentence only. 3 - The output from SS for that sentence only. Thanks. John