Re: Subclause marking

On 6/21/05, Yann Kiraly <yann_kiraly@...> wrote:
> 
> 
> 1. Is this marking really unambigious, or at least unambigous enough for a 
> natlang?
> 
> 2. This marking system often creates initialy ambigious sentences, that 
> are clarified later on in the
> clause by the marker u (for example: "I child e female u e see.", where 
> the second e marks the 
> whole preceeding clause). Is the human mind capable of easily 
> understanding such sentences on
> one go, and do you know of any natlangs that produce similar situations?

Firstly, does the above mean something like "I see the girlchild" -- that 
is, I see the child that is female? Or does it mean "I see that the child is 
female"? If it's the first, consider extracting "child" from the subclause, 
to make "I female u child e see"; it'll save you from various sorts of 
possible ambiguity later on. 

How do you distinguish "I saw the man that the girl killed" from "I saw the 
girl that killed the man" from "I saw the man that killed the girl"? (Does 
your language have voice, for example? That could handle it.)

The main tricky thing to watch out for is verbs that might have multiple 
valencies. That is, if "sold" can sometimes take a direct object and 
sometimes not, or if "eat" can take an object or be left without. Or, as 
Henrik pointed out, if the language has pro-drop. Keeping the valencies of 
verbs strict -- for example, distinguishing "I eat" from "I eat X" with an 
antipassive affix on "eat", and "I sold X" from "I sold X to Y" with a 
valency-increasing affix -- will save a lot of ambiguity.

Anyway, I/we can give you a rundown of whatever sorts of ambiguity might 
arise, if you'll just provide a little more information. As Henrik noted, 
some ambiguity is natural -- a lot of languages put up with more ambiguity 
than English does -- so I figure you'll be alright either way.

Good luck!
-- 
Patrick Littell 
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