Re: Relative pronoun?

H. S. Teoh wrote:

>Interesting... I'm struggling with noun phrases and indirect discourse in
>my conlang right now, and I'm having trouble differentiating between the
>two. I'm trying to unify direct/indirect discourse, so that the following
>two sentences would be rendered identically:
>         "I said to her, Look at that house!"
>         "I said to her to look(?) at that house."
I think I would change this to:
"I said for her to look at that house."
Still a bit awkward though. Better:
"I told her to look at that house."

>The problem is, can the phrase "look at that house" be regarded as a verb
>argument? (Indirect object?)
Certainly, "look at that house" is an argument of the verb. In fact, it is
an obligatory argument, because the sentence would be ungramatical if you
left it out: *"I said to her." Incomplete.

If the terms direct/indirect object are applied to it, then it would be
considered a direct object.  The indirect object is "to her".

>  Because it could potentially cause
>ambiguities, for example:
>    (a)  She told them that the house fell down.
>    (b)  She told them about the house falling down.
>
>If we regard both cases as (in)direct objects, then my conlang would
>render them identically -- which may not be desirable. What's the
>"correct" (or formal?) analysis of the above sentences? Is the phrase in
>(a) a direct/indirect object, or is it a subclause, or what is it?
(a) "that the house fell down" is an embedded clause. It is functioning as
the "theme" of the entire sentence, which is the same role a noun would
play if a noun had been used instead.

(b) "the house falling down" is what is known as a small clause: it looks
like a clause, but lacks some of the characteristics of a full clause such
as nominative case for the subject and explicit tense marking. It is also
functioning as the "theme" of the sentence.

So they are both distinct from each other and from a noun phrase direct
object. It is quite typical for languages to treat them all differently (if
they actually distinguish small clauses from emedded clauses).



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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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