Re: Soaloa evolves, and a small challenge

Charlie wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "David J. Peterson" <dedalvs@G...>
> wrote:
>
> Hmm...  How about one such as the following:
>
> "It's the kind of game that you just want to go home, sit down
> and play right away."
>
> I consider the sentence to be ungrammatical because I view "that" as a
> relative pronoun which is the subject of a verb that is not
> expressed.  Expressed grammatically, I believe it should be "It's the
> kind of game that MAKES you just want to go home, sit down and play
> right away."
>
That's one way of looking at it, and if I'd followed the structure
completely in Kash, it probably would have required the verb _rumek_ 'to
cause'. But by topicalizing "this is the kind of game..." > "a game of this
kind ("ambanip naya tayu" we avoided having to do that.

However, as constructed, I feel David's Sentence is OK.  Consider:

I want to go home, sit down and play the game. -- which is a conjoining of
the three related sentences
I want to go home + I want to sit down + I want to play the game

It becomes a sort of serial-verb construction:  A[go someplace] + B[do
something] + C[do something else]-- provided B is something you can
typically/logically do in A, and C is something you can typically/logically
do under both circumstances A and B. Some of the counter-exs. given by David
and others violate one or another of these _logical_ requirements, and so
come out as nonsense.

All David has done is turn it into a cleft sentence by fronting "the game"
(with some added words), but basically--

It's X that I want to....

(There are undoubtedly constraints on which A+B+C's can be turned into a
cleft-S; I can't imagine offhand what they might be, but certainly--

"I want to go home, get undressed, and take a shower" cannot >
*"It's a shower I want to go home, get undressed, and take."

Note that if you add a resumptive pronoun, it becomes a sort of
parody-Yiddish-English sentence--

"It's the kind of game that you want to go home, sit down, and play it."

(If I'd been paying more attention to my own Kash grammar, the S should have
been
"ambanip naya tayu, na yá, hamelo...etc." which is their true Cleft-S, as
opposed to the topic/comment structure (without _na ya_) I actually used.)

Sorry if this seems disjointed; syntax was never my strong point :-((