Re: Subordinate clauses

Quoting Carsten Becker <post@...>:

> Roger Mills: I wasn't sure about this, as I said, so I looked up in my
> grammar what the relative pronoun refers to. And they wrote that the
> relative pronoun always refers to the subject of the main clause -- if I
> understood that correctly.
I'm afraid I believe you did not; it would mean that the following sentence from
my German grammar were agrammatical:

Ich hab mich sehr über den Roman gefreut, den du mir geschenkt hast.

Here, the relative pronoun refers to the _object_ of the main main clause,
namely _den Roman_.

My grammar does not seem to say anything explicitly about whether the relative
can refer to a possessive genitive, but it takes the trouble to point out
explicitly that it _can_ refered to the thing possessed. It also lists the
example sentence:

Ich weiss nichts von dem, was er erzählt.

were the relative pronoun refers to _von dem_. I find it hard to believe that
prepositional phrases with _von_ would here be treated differently from
genitives, or that _was_ and _der_ would behave differently.

I shall try and keep my opens for any conclusive examples in actual German texts.

                                                             Andreas