Re: Branching typologies [was: Re: "easiest" languages, SE Asian word-order typologies]

In a message dated 9/27/01 8:12:00 PM, laokou@MSN.COM writes:

>"John met the man in the hall that had been handing out flyers about the
>upcoming game."
>
>It's quite unambiguous since it is clear that it's the HALL that was handing
>out the flyers (as relative pronouns, by all rights, should normally follow
>the antecedents they modify). :)  :) :)
I agree ... it seems like it the hall that's handing out flyers. :-) But
that's just because I had some prescriptivist teachers who hammered into my
head that "that" cannot be used instead of "who" when talking about people.
If in someone's dialect/idiolect "that" can apply to anything, then the
sentence is definitely ambiguous. If the word "who" had been used, then it
would be clear that it was the man handing out of the flyers.

>That original sentence sounded a _little_ funky to me grammatically, but
>certainly understandable. To me, it sounds akin to expressions like "the
>lady who was sitting on the corner's purse"; it may make your fifth grade
>grammar teacher cringe, but it's perfectly understandable in everyday
>parlance.
Hehe, this is what comes about when left-branching and right-branching mix!
Eloshtan almost has the same problem, but doesn't quite.

If it's the lady's purse, it would be:
qilje kutctoctov va glif tec golsa
lady sit.3.PAST.CONJ corner at.4 POS.3 bag
(conj = conjunctive, which is used for relative clauses; POS = possessive, #s
are person #s)

If it's the corner's purse, it would be:
qilje kutctoctov va tef golsa glill
lady sit.3.PAST.CONJ corner POS.4 bag at.5

One thing to note here is that Eloshtan treats "lady," "corner," and "purse"
all as different persons, and the word for "at" has to agree with the one
that is represents. But even Eloshtan has its limits, namely, that there are
only 6 persons available, so if you've got a lot of nouns in a sentence,
things can get ambiguous pretty quickly in terms of who's who. The more
important difference is that English does not have to keep its prepositions
next to the things they are referring to, whereas Eloshtan usually does. An
English speaker would never say "the lady who was sitting the corner's on
purse," even if the purse is the thing that the lady is on. The one place
where this breaks down in Eloshtan is when a possessor noun has a relative
clause - the relative clause does comes between the noun and the possessive
particle (which is really just another postposition, except for this
difference and one other), whereas with any other postposition, the order
would be noun-postposition-relative clause.

>I agree with your analysis of the second sentence which you created; there
>is the ambiguity you describe there. And from a totally literal, logical
>interpretation of the first sentence, I guess you have a point. But I don't
>parse every sentence I hear or read with a fine-toothed comb, and so for
>me
>both sentences contain the same information and are equally ambiguous.
>Perhaps "who" instead of "that" would have made a difference for me.
>
>Kou
Josh Roth
members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html