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HELP: Relative Clauses with Postpositions

From:David Peterson <thatbluecat@...>
Date:Wednesday, February 11, 2004, 3:02
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

Replies

JR <fuscian@...>
Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Ph. D. <phild@...>
Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
Muke Tever <hotblack@...>