Re: Relative clauses in Ikanirae Seru

Christophe wrote:

> En réponse à Estel Telcontar :
>
> >(Anyone know about a natlang that marks relative clauses in a similar
> >way, using a marker like my |se|?  What do such natlangs do about the
> >ambiguity I found?)
As to natlangs, I can't help, because the ones I know can show the
difference either by inflecting the rel.pron. or with verb conjugation--
...man who saw him vs. ...man who(m) he saw
... el hombre que le vió... el hombre _al quien_ vió
...homo qui eum vidit ...homo quem vidit
>
> Often natlangs with simple ways to mark relative clauses like yours can
> relativise only some functions, i.e. for instance I think that some
> Austronesian language (can't remember which one, but it's a cousin of
> Tagalog) can only relativise subjects, i.e. the antecedent of the relative
> clause can only be the *subject* of the relative clause.
I think you have Malay/Indonesian in mind, but not quite...The role of the
antecedent doesn't matter, but the relative pronoun 'yang' _must_ be the
subject of the relative clause.  This leads to the so-called active/passive
distinction---

...orang yang (me)lihat dia '...man who saw him' (melihat is the "active"
form, or actor-focus form if you will; yang is the subject of the clause);
clearly, it was the man who saw someone else.

...orang yang dilihatnya '...man whom he saw' (dilihat is 3d pers. "passive"
or object-focus, -nya indicates the agent, this could be read literally as
'the man who was seen by him'); here, it was the man who was seen by someone
else.

It gets more complicated when non-3d pers. agents are involved (orang yang
kulihat 'the man who(m) I saw'); and it gets very complicated if not
impossible to relativize a gentive, dative or some other case--- 'the man
whose book I read', 'the man to whom I gave the book' or 'the man from whom
we bought the car'

> Finally, another way, especially for languages which are *not* pro-drop,
is
> to indicate the relativised function by the *absence* of a pronoun. Taking
> your example again, *"manikoso se _ seru na eki" ("_" indicates the hole
:)
> ) would mean "the man that talks about him", while *"manikoso se eki seru
> na _" would mean "the man that he talks about". This way is how European
> languages do it :) .
That would be a solution, if Estel is willing to drop the pronoun in that
case...

And this discussion has just made me realize that Kash has the same problem
as Ikanirae Seru, since its relativizer is also invariant and more like a
conjunction--

...kaçut re ne ya/tikas
   man  REL him 3s/see
 = either 'the man who saw him' or 'the man whom he saw' Aargh!!  I'll have
to think about this....It might be possible to drop the person-pfx in the
first case-- it's done when adjectives are put into rel.clauses (i.e. when
the subj. of the rel.clause = the antecedent)--

ñaki yavelu
car  3s/new 'the car is new'
vs.
 ñaki velu = ñaki re velu
car   new  = car  REL new
'new car'
(ñaki re yavelu would be pedantically ultra-correct)

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