TIERORDER – Reorder Dependent Tiers to Canonical Order

Status: Current Last updated: 2026-05-12 13:40 EDT

Purpose

Reorders dependent tiers into a consistent order. The legacy manual describes TIERORDER as putting dependent tiers into a consistent alphabetical order, with /lib/fixes/tierorder.cut able to control the order.

clan-core sorts dependent tiers on each utterance according to its built-in canonical ordering.

Usage

chatter clan tierorder file.cha

Options

This command has no configurable options.

Behavior

Dependent tiers are sorted into the following canonical order (per the tier_order() priority function at crates/clan/clan-core/src/transforms/tierorder.rs:57-100):

1. Linguistic analysis tiers (priorities 0-5): %mor → %gra → %pho → %mod → %wor → %sin

2. Phon project syllabification/alignment tiers (priorities 6-8): %xmodsyl → %xphosyl → %xphoaln

3. Behavioral/descriptive tiers (priorities 10-18): %act → %cod → %com → %spa → %gpx → %sit → %exp → %int → %add

4. Simple text tiers (priorities 20-30): %alt → %coh → %def → %eng → %err → %fac → %flo → %gls → %ort → %par → %tim

5. User-defined tiers (priority 100): %x* (anything beyond the standard set)

6. Unsupported tiers (priority 101): tiers that hit the grammar’s catch-all but aren’t recognized CHAT tiers

Utterances with zero or one dependent tier are left unchanged.

Differences from CLAN

• Manual configurability not yet mirrored: The legacy manual describes tierorder.cut as controlling tier order. The current implementation uses a built-in ordering instead.
• Operates on AST rather than raw text.
• Uses the framework transform pipeline (parse -> transform -> serialize -> write).