Re: HELP: Relative Clauses with Postpositions

I would analyse the sentence somehow like:

plain-ACC Shinar-XXX-land-LOC 3PLHUM-find-PAST-3SGINA

where:
- ACC is Accusative
- XXX is a case that doesn't exist in your system, and
would be something like a 'Callative', meaning that
it's the name of the referred land
- LOC is Locative, but should be precised as Inessive
for ex (inside, no movement)
- 3PLHUM is 3rd Person Plural Human
- PAST is Past
- 3SGINA is 3rd Person Singular Inanimated (could me
more precise too: it is not an concrete entity with
borders and shape and weight etc; also: is this plain
considered as near or far, or other ?)

In the case where 'the land of Shinar' would not mean
'the Shinar-called-land', but rather 'the plain
belonging to the people, or to the state, of Shinar',
then it might be a genitive, or a possessive, or...

I guess the first thing to do would be to define very
accurately the semantic meaning(s) of the syntactic
cases you use.

Anyway, I can't see any serious problem regarding the
order of the terms as proposed above. The locative
information being a circumstant, not an actant, you
can place it wherever you like, it doesn't interfere
with the SOV scheme. It may depend of you wanting to
emphasize it or not, for ex.

--- David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was trying to do some work on the Babel text in a
> language of mine, and
> came across some problems with the sentence "They
> found a plain in the land of
> Shinar".   Here are the facts:
>
> -SOV word order
> -Postpositional
> -Cases: Nom., Acc., Gen., Dat., Loc., Inst.,
> Adverbial.
> -A noun in the genitive follows the noun it
> possesses.
> -A noun modified by a preposition (generally) gets
> the locative case.
>
> Now here's the problem.   The above sentence would,
> basically, look something
> like this:
>
> plain land [of Shinar] in [they found it]
>
> There might also be a verb like Spanish "estar" in
> there, but that's not the
> tough part.   I'm trying to figure out where to put
> that postposition.   It
> just doesn't make sense to me.   Which seems more
> "right":
>
> plain-ACC. land-NOM. Shinar-GEN. in [they found it]
>
> or
>
> plain-ACC. land-LOC. Shinar-GEN. in [they found it]
>
> or
>
> plain-ACC. land-LOC. in Shinar-GEN. [they found it]
>
> For some reason, the last one seems like the one
> that "should" be correct, to
> me, but then it ends up looking like the wacky
> language we've been
> discussion, where you have an adposition coming
> between two NP's.
>
> Anyway, what I want to avoid is doing what Turkish
> or Japanese does, where
> you'd say something like "the in-the-land-of-Shinar
> plain".   And I actually
> have a good reason for wanting to avoid this
> construction, I just...can't
> remember it.   Anyway, can you help?
>
> -David
>

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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