Re: Creative ways to form relative clauses?

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 08:39:03 -0500, Daniel Bowman <danny.c.bowman@...>
wrote:

>Any creative (read:
>non English and romance language) ways to handle [relative clauses]?
I've always kinda liked the strategy of internally headed relative clauses
for this.  Instead of gapping or reducing to a pronoun the noun phrase
inside the relative clause which refers to the head, you leave that noun
phrase intact inside the relative clause and gap or reduce etc. the main
clause one instead.  So where English has "I hate the man [who my wife left
me for yesterday]" a lang with IHRCs might have "I hate [my wife left me for
the man yesterday]".  And you could, for instance, stick a topic marker on
"man" in the relative clause if you wanted to mark it out as the head.

There's a bit on how this fits into the typology of relative clauses on that
WALS page.

Alex