[85134] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Relative clause fun
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Trimboli)
Fri Oct 10 08:20:19 2008
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:17:31 -0400
From: David Trimboli <david@trimboli.name>
In-reply-to: <C5141B9B.2527%speersd@georgetown.edu>
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
d'Armond Speers wrote:
> However, in other languages there are other options for which element of the
> relative clause can be the head noun, besides just the subject and object.
> Išm wondering whether their omission from TKD is just absence of evidence,
> or evidence of absence. (I.e., are they possible but not described, or are
> they not possible because they are not described?)
I do recall that Marc Okrand, when asked about the "ship in which I
fled" problem, said he couldn't make the relative clause work for
anything except a subject or object head noun. I don't think that comes
directly from Maltz, however.
> (A) Indirect Object
>
> loDvaD tev lunobbogh chaH ghaH [John]šeš
> John is the man who they gave the prize to
>
> (B) Object of preposition
>
> DujDaq nov vIleghbogh vItIš
> I fixed the ship at which I saw the alien
>
> (C) Possessive
>
> yaS HIch vItIšbogh ghaH
> Hešs the officer whose gun I fixed
I find these difficult to parse, even when I know what you're doing. The
trouble is that you have no way of knowing that the head noun isn't the
object in each case, instead of the (A) indirect object, (B) locative,
or (C) genitive nouns. They can also be interpreted, according to the
rules we know, as
(A) John is the prize whom they gave to the man
(B) I fixed the alien whom I saw on the ship
On the ship, I fixed the alien whom I saw
(C) He's the officer's gun which I fixed
I believe that, if it were possible to build relative clauses whose head
nouns weren't subjects or objects of the main clause, we would need some
kind of indication of this in the sentence, some kind of marker or
special syntax. We would need an explicit rule to recognize this; none
can be deduced from the scanty available evidence.
--
SuStel
Stardate 8776.1
