Are there any theoretical properties of punctuation marks that allow to identify them without understanding the text?

Linguistics Asked by Misha Monahov on January 5, 2021

Imaging that you have discovered a stone with written text in an ancient (or alien!) language that doesn’t resemble any known language. Is there a way to show that some of the symbols are likely punctuation marks?
How linguists would approach this problem?
The text is sufficiently long to test any statistical model. The direction of writing is known (e.g., left to right).

computational linguistics parsing punctuation theoretical linguistics

Are there any theoretical properties of punctuation marks that allow to identify them without understanding the text?

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