Re: Subclause marking

Hi!

Yann Kiraly <yann_kiraly@...> writes:
>...
> 1. Is this marking really unambigious, ...
This depends: is the language pro-drop?  Do you have verbs that may be
both transitive or intransitive?

Example:

   V1,V2: verbs
   N1,N2: nouns

   N1 N2 e V1 u e V2

It may be undecidable whether N1 is an argument of V1 or of V2 if both
V1 and V2 may be both transitive or intransitive:


     (N1 N2 e V1) u e V2
  vs N1 (N2 e V1) u e V2

or if both are transitive and you allow subjects to be dropped:

     N_dropped (N1 N2 e V1) u e V2
     N1 (N_dropped N2 e V1) u e V2

> ... or at least unambigous enough for a natlang?
Natlangs may be awfully ambiguous and still functional, so yes.

> 2. This marking system often creates initialy ambigious sentences,
> that are clarified later on in the clause ...
If they are hard to parse, these have the funny name 'garden path
sentences'. :-)

> ... 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?
This is usually no problem for native speakers, because the right
decision is usually 'guessed' correctly early in the sentence.  Garden
path sentences are those where you guess wrong.

It is often the case in SOV langs (but not at all restricted to those)
and they are pretty wide-spread still.  Examples are German, Japanese,
Korean to name a few.  Also in English, you can produce very long
garden path sentences, mainly because verbs and nouns often look the
same, and because you can drop the relative clause marker 'that' , so
on the surface, it's hard to decide until you get a keyword later.

Google for 'garden path sentences' to find English examples.  To cite
some:

Noun/verb ambiguity in English:

   Until the police arrest the drug dealers control the street.


Possibility to drop 'that':

   The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

**Henrik