Re: HELP: Relative Clauses with Postpositions

David Peterson wrote:

> 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]
I think the second one is fine; it's clear enough that "in" goes with
"land of Shinar" as a unit.

> 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?
Wouldn't that be more like "the Shinar-of-land-in plain"? (At least in
Japanese; I'm not familiar with Turkish word order.)

I seem to remember that there's a general tendency for long modifiers
like "in the land of Shinar" to follow the words they modify, but I
don't know if that holds for verb-final languages in general (clearly it
doesn't for Japanese in particular).

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