tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 10 05:19:56 2008

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Re: Relative clause fun

David Trimboli ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

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.
> I¹m 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]¹e¹
 >     John is the man who they gave the prize to
 >
 > (B) Object of preposition
 >
 >     DujDaq nov vIleghbogh vItI¹
 >     I fixed the ship at which I saw the alien
 >
 > (C) Possessive
 >
 >     yaS HIch vItI¹bogh ghaH
 >     He¹s 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

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