The same discussion considers a condition placed before the repeated formulae. On Abu Hanifa’s account, the first utterance is connected to the condition, while later wording is evaluated through the principle of separate utterance and successive legal effect.
For the two students, the continued syntactic connection permits a different relation between the condition and all the subsequent segments. The text says “wa qala: yata‘allaqu jami‘an, wa yanzilu ‘ala al-tartib”: all remain related to the condition, and the effects descend in order.
The vital distinction is between connectedness of speech and sequence of legal effects. These are not the same analytical question.