Re: Subordinate clauses

Firstly, thanks to Philippe and Christophe for their parses of the
French example.  I knew Christophe wouldn't let me down in
finding an aspect of French syntax I'd never heard of before. :))

Sally wrote:
>[...] it must be a law in Teonaht that you can't have two relative
>clauses nested in the main noun clause.
The capacity of verbal working memory imposes that kind of
restriction pragmatically on any language, of course, but I hadn't
thought of grammaticalising it before.  I'm sure there's an anadew
here!

and again:
>Li zef kelry hain, vyrm lo kohs?  The first clause is syntactically
>relative because there is no verb for zef, "man"-- it is only "the
>man THAT I SAW."  Vyrm lo kohs is the main clause.
Yes, of course, sorry.  I was thinking in T4, where the translation
of 'the man that I saw' is also a valid, albeit unusual, translation
of 'The man was seen by me.'

Jonathan.

_________________________________________________________________
It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today!
http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger