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In Forrest Gump, Forrest says: "I couldn't tell where heaven stopped, and the earth began; it was so beautiful.”
What is the grammar after 'began'? Does a comma or semi-colon indicate a break then a continuation of the same idea or does it indicate that the heaven/earth barrier is one thing and it was so beautiful is separate? In the film he is connecting them so what grammar is correct for this?
The cited text is just an example of hyperbaton / stylistic inversion of the more syntactically "standard" version (with optional relativiser that connecting the two clauses)...
It was so beautiful [that] I couldn't tell where heaven stopped, and the earth began.
The comma after stopped is entirely optional, but given there would have been little if any detectable pause there in the actual spoken "original", I wouldn't have included it.
And since the modern trend is to "less, lighter" punctuation, once that unnecessary comma is discarded, imho it becomes much more appropriate (read, "less pretentious") to downgrade the cited semicolon to a comma.
