tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 10 20:43:24 2008

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: Relative clause fun

d'Armond Speers ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

> In fact, this is such an obvious and simple way to state the original
> idea that I have to wonder why one would even consider the
> complicated attempt at a beneficiary-headed relative clause.

I gave a talk today on "linguistic knowledge" to a high school IB class
taught by a friend of mine; I do this every year on different topics.
Yesterday while I was going over some prep material on universal grammar I
came across something called the "accessibility hierarchy", which describes
variations in relative clauses permissible in a given language.

Subject > Object > Indirect Object > Object of Preposition > Genetive > ...

For example, all languages can use the subject of a relative clause as a
head noun.   Some languages allow an object as the head noun.  Fewer allow
the IO, and so on.  But what appears to be uniform is that, if a language
permits one of these constructions, it permits all of the ones to the left
in the hierarchy.

I spent a few minutes to sketch out some of the different variations in
Klingon, and decided to post it, just for fun.  It would have been
interesting if Klingon violated this hierarchy, in the same way it violates
combinations of color words.

> -- ghunchu'wI'

--Holtej

Back to archive top level