Re: Subordinate clauses

Carsten Becker wrote:
> I'll do my best to give you an explanation of the cases. I'm afraid I
> cannot really answer your question. But yes, of course, German cases
> work basically like the English ones, only that we've got a
> dative/accusative distinction English does not have. A syntactic
> breakdown would look like this:
>
>  main clause pt. 1      relative clause  main clause pt. 2
> |--------^---------| |---------^---------| |---^---|
> Der Hund des Mannes, den ich gesehen habe, war grün.
> ---v---- ----v-----  -v- -v- ------v-----  -v- -v--
>   NOM.      GEN.      |   |        |      VERB ???
> Subject              ACC NOM     VERB
>                       | Subject
>                       |
>                       `-{ This is the relative pronoun   }
>                         { referring to "der Hund", which }
>                         { is the subject of the main     }
>                         { clause. This is grammatically. }
>                         { My feeling tells me that the   }
>                         { relative pronoun refers to the }
>                         { genitive object in this case.  }
>                         { But I may be wrong. Anyone?    }
That's what I was wondering... Since both Hund and Mann are masculing, is
there any way in Germ. to make the relative pronoun unambiguously refer to
one or the other.  Engl. has this possibility, as there are three Engl.
versions of your German sentence, two of which are unambiguous--

1. The dog of the man_who(m)_ I saw was green-- 'who(m)' clearly refers to
the man. So would "The man's dog, whom I saw,..." but awkwardly (needs
different intonation).

2. The dog of the man (~The man's dog) _which_ I saw.... -- clearly refers
to the dog.

The 3d, which is causing all the contention,--
== (a) The dog of the man }
OR (b) The man's dog     }  _that_ I saw...

is unfortunately amenable to either interpretation since _that_ can refer to
either antecedent, though IMHO in practice a 'that' Rel.Cl. tends to
directly follow its antecedent.

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