tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jul 11 03:03:27 1997

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Re: Apposition



> Date: Sun, 6 Jul 97 19:31:23 UT
> From: "Neal Schermerhorn" <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Apposition
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>

> ghItlh charghwI':
> >> romoluSngan ghaH jaghma''e'
> >> Our enemy is a Romulan.

> >> romoluSngan ghaHbogh jaghma''e' vIHoHta'
> >> I have killed our enemy, who is a Romulan.
> >> OR
> >> I have killed a Romulan, who our enemy is. (Same meaning.)

> >This is interesting, especially given Nick Nicholas's article in
> >the current HolQeD. Since the {-'e'} has to be there on the noun
> >which is subject of the copula, does that also count as focus
> >marker in the relative clause, making this second translation
> >invalid? Krankor came up with the idea of using {-'e'} to mark
> >the head noun of a relative clause when it is ambiguous, as you
> >take it to be here, so technically, you have marked the subject
> >as the head noun, though you HAD to because of {ghaH}, but >then,
> >since it is a copula, after all, it doesn't really MATTER which
> >is the head noun.

> >I'd just lose the second translation and be happy with the first
> >one.

I'd go along with charghwI' on this as a practical solution --- *but* the 
fact is that, although Okrand uses -'e' to disambiguate relative clauses, 
it's not as if this is 'hardcoded in the grammar'. In theory, there's nothing 
actually wrong with "ROMULUSNGAN'E' ghaHbogh jaghma''e' vIHoHta'." The fact 
is, though, that we have -'e' doing two different jobs, and one is 
obligatorily in the sentence (copula subject) while the other isn't (relative 
clause head). So the copula subject function of -'e' has to take precedent.

> pab'e' Del charghwI' vISov! I posed this question in part to ask about this
> specific situation. Since I had presumed that Krankor's head noun marking 
> was OK'ed, but not ever used, by MO (the above-mentioned article set me 
> straight
> after I posted this message) it seemed that perhaps either noun could be 
> the
> head, and in fact it didn't matter at all which was considered. I'm simply
> stating equivalence of the two nouns, and that conveniently, I feel, makes
> head-noun marking unnecessary.

Well, head-marking isn't an issue in romuluSngan ghaHbogh jaghma''e', since 
the -'e' comes from ghaH anyway. I don't think the two English sentences you 
give *are* 100% equivalent (we're just lucky there isn't obligatory -'e' 
marking after other verbs often considered copulas, such as moj.) But in this 
case, yeah, charghwI' is right: cut your losses, and go with the first 
interpretation, switching the nouns around if you want the second (for all 
the difference there actually is between them.)

-- 
"Assuming, for whatever reasons, that neither scholar presented the evidence
 properly, then there remains a body of evidence you have not yet destroyed
 because it has never been presented." --- Harold Fleming
|NickNicholas|Linguistics&AppliedLinguistics|UniversityOfMelbourne|Australia|
| [email protected] http://www.lexicon.net.au/~opoudjis |




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