Re: Grammar-holes: secondary predication

Philip Newton, On 17/07/2007 07:57:
> On 7/16/07, Douglas Koller <laokou@...> wrote:
>> I'm not sure that a language not having a structure that another does
>> is necessarily a "hole." Besides
>>
>> > >"We spent all night talking about I can't remember what."
>> > >"She bought I lost count how many kinds of cheese."
>>                                                  ^
>>                                 (I'd put  "of"  here)
>>
>> are, for me, akin to "I ran into a man that I don't remember his
>> name." They're out there, they're understandable, which I guess makes
>> them grammatical on a descriptive level, but whether as a matter of
>> style or prescriptiveness, they still make me cringe.
>
> What about "I just met the woman who Tom is the son of Bill and" / "I
> just met the woman who Tom is the son of Bill and her", for even more
> grammatical weirdness?
Good question.

First of all, we should be clear that Philip's exx are different from mine -- the
structures Kou balks at -- in that mine have been around in English for
centuries and have been documented in grammars and so forth, whereas afaik
Philip's are not part of English.

Second, "I just met the woman who Tom is the son of Bill and" really does strike me as
a hole, in that it's something that one might well want to say. I developed a
way of rendering it in my conlang (the details were ticky, because conjunction
in my conlang is asyndetic).

Third, while Philip's exx are good exx of holes, they don't seem to be difficult or
structurally complex, whereas mine were originally adduced in response to a
request for exx of difficult & structurally complex constructions.

--And.