Re: Syntactic differences within parts of speech

On 9/1/06, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> But you should use 'vor einigen Wochen' (i.e., 'several weeks ago'),
> not 'seit einigen Wochen' (i.e. 'since several weeks'), since the
> latter, like in English, expresses an ongoing action (lit.: *'The
> flowers I've been buying since several weeks.').
Or in more idiomatic (to me) English: *The flowers I've been buying
*for* several weeks (now).

> ObConlang: in S17 (the wordless one), I've stolen the Japanese/Korean
> style where internally headed relative clauses (IHRC) (a construction
> unknown to English) are used for descriptive meaning, and externally
> headed relative clauses (EHRC) (those that English and German use) for
> restrictive meaning (I don't know whether the semantic distinction is
> that clear in Japanese and Korean, but at least it is in my Conlang
> :-)):
>
>    EHRC:
>        [kinou     kaitotta] sakana-wa ii.
>        [yesterday bought]   fish-TOP  good.
>
>        ('fish' is outside the relative clause, thus externally headed)
>
>        'The fish [I] bought yesterday is good.'
>
>    IHRC
>       [kinou     sakana-o kaitotta]-no-wa   ii.
>       [yesterday fish-OBJ bought]  -RES-TOP
>
>       ('fish' is inside the relative clause and referred to from the
>       outside by the resumptive particle 'no').
>
>         'The fish, which I bought yesterday, is good.'
>      or 'The fish, which was bought yesterday, is good.'
>
> (Please don't hesitate to correct mistakes in my badly broken
> Japanese.)
I was also surprised at your use of "kaitoru" and expected "kau" (or,
in this case, "katta").

However, my rusty Japanese interprets "kinou sakana-o katta-no-wa ii"
as "my buying the fish yesterday was good/a good thing" -- that is,
having "no" refer to the action rather than to the object. Though that
might be interference from sentences with verb+"koto", now that I
think about it -- "kinou sakana-o katta-koto-wa ii".

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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