Re: CHAT: Brainstorming! Relative clauses

On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Irina Rempt-Drijfhout wrote:

A lot of things on relative clauses in Valdyan, and of course I sent
it off before I'd done all my thinking.

I was distracted by all the sample sentences being in the past tense
- I went to great lengths to put them in the past tense in Valdyan as
well, whereas that's not the way Valdyans would do it if they're just
giving examples, they'd use the (unmarked) present.

I've noticed that Valdyan doesn't nest relative clauses if they apply
to the object, only if they apply to the subject: you can have

   S [S-REL] O V

like this one:

> dost    lea muzea   chalat     moy
> dog-nom REL cat-acc see-PRS-3s large-nom
"The dog that sees the cat is large"

Note:

  dost    moy       lea muzea   chalat
  dog-nom large-nom REL cat-acc see-PRS-3s

can only mean "The large dog that sees the cat".

You can also have

   S O V [O-REL]

like this one:

> dost    muzea   chalat     lea mychea    trudenat
> dog-nom cat-acc see-PRS-3s REL mouse-acc kill-PRF-PRS-3s
"The dog sees the cat that has killed the mouse"

but not

   S O [O-REL] V

* dost    muzea   lea mychea    trudenat        chalat
  dog-nom cat-acc REL mouse-acc kill-PRF-PRS-3s see-PRS-3s

In this example:

> dost    muzea   chalut     lea gyr      lean     domoy
> dog-nom cat-acc see-PST-3s REL tail-nom REL-poss AUG.big-nom
the relative clause clearly applies to the cat (object); if it
applied to the dog (subject) it would be:

  dost    lea gyr      lean     domoy       muzea   chalut
  dog-nom REL tail-nom REL-poss AUG.big-nom cat-acc see-PST-3s

"The dog whose tail was very big saw the cat"

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)