Re: HELP: Relative Clauses with Postpositions

David Peterson wrote:
<<<<
> -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.
.....
> 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?
>>>>
and Josh wrote:

<<<<
The rule is that postpositions have to go directly after the noun, and
relative
clauses end up coming after. I'd be surprised if natlangs did this (unless
it's one of those languages where modifiers can get tossed to and fro
anyway).
>>>>
(As I already mentioned it here) a recently bestselling linguist writes that
a feature of that kind cannot be handled by a human brain! :-)
Notwithstanding, if he had learnt foreign languages before writing a book on
language, he would have been surprised to find that Sumerian combines
rengens-rectum and postposed modifiers without "tossing to and fro"
modifiers. Guarani does that too but I can't remember exactly how.

In Sumerian you could have:

land *shinar ak a
kur [*shinar GEN] LOC
"in the land of shinar"

And even:

lugal kur *shinar ak ak ra
king [land [shinar GEN] GEN] DAT
"to the king of the land of shinar"

And since the genitive makes subclauses--you may even have as well:

[king [land [*shinar GEN] LOC] rules GEN] DAT
"to the king who rules in the land of Shinar"

Quite apart from that--I don't understand why David's word order wouldn't
work:

land-LOC in shinar-GEN
in the land of shinar

This works fine, doesn't it? The only problem I could imagine is that GEN
could also tag the argument of the verb like in plenty of languages. Imagine
that like in Estonian the partitive GEN tags the object (ACC) of the verb:

Land-LOC in Shinar-GEN they-found-it
They found in the land of shinar
OR
They found shinar in the land

But this being set aside, the relative clause may very well follow the noun:

Plain-ACC land-LOC in Shinar-GEN (SUB) king-NOM wise-ADV rules-REL
they-found-it.
They found a plain in the land of Shinar that the king rules wisely.

Or something to that effect, the problem being here to guess where the
subclauses start--but Japanese has the same problem. That's why I used SUB
to show the place where something should warn "subclause ahead!"

µ.