Re: Genitives NPs as Relative Clauses

Imperative wrote :

<<
Christophe Grandsire wrote:
I've been taught that this "no" had nothing to do with the
genitive
marker "no"
but was a short form of "mono": (concrete) thing, used to
nominalise
subclauses
to use them as subjects or objects of sentences (that's why
it's
followed in
your examples with the object postposition "o". In Japanese,
with the
exception
of the topic marker "wa" which can follow other
postpositions,
postpositions
cannot follow each other).
>>
I haven't been taught that...could anyone verify its
veracity?
-------------------------

i don't know where this "no" comes from. there are plenty of
"no"s in japanese ;-)
the first line i remember of a poem goes "aki no no no" (of
the field of fall).
this one nominalizes a subclause that is not followed by a
verb. i wouldn't say it's a genitive but it is also true
that "no" is used after a noun to mean "the one of":
boku no wa motto ookii
mine is way bigger
and also "hataraku no" may as well mean "the one who works"
and "the fact of working".
hataraku no wa bakayarou ze    those who work are plain
idiots!
hataraku no wa dame da yo    there is no way you can work
and sometimes you don't know whether you speak of the fact
of the agent:
hataraku no wa baka da yo
so maybe we could say that "no" is at the same time a
genitive and a nominalizer :-)

hataraite iru no ga mieru.
(i/one) see that (one) is working.
compared to:
hataraite iru hito ga mieru.
(i/one) can see the working guy.

but in the spoken language, sentences often avoid the
"verb+no" structure and use the -te/-de form.
so i would rather say:
hataraite ite mieru.
you can see he works.
hataraite ii ka
is it ok to work?

if you want to stuck a clitic on a verb, you need "no" like
that. but the "ni" clitic is stuck without "no" sometimes in
fixed expressions.

there is also "to", "to iu no wa" or in spoken language
"-tte", "-tte wa"
hataraite iru to yoku mieru yo
you can tell he's working!

anyway, thinking of it, there is also the "sou da" clause
ending that would make things less heavy here:
hataraite iru sou da    i've heard is working
hatarakisou da    he's apparently working

regarding piling up clitics, it's true that you don't do
that usually, except with "wa" (except for "*ga wa"). but
you can still see that:
tokyo he no densha
the train bound for tokyo
tokyo kara no densha
the train from tokyo

there are plenty of clitics without the final verb in
newspapers' titles:
seikai wa iyoiyo heiwa he ka
the world on its way to peace at last?
there are also fixed expressions like "no ni" (despite),
"made ni" (until and during), "-te kara" "after ...-ing"
that combine clitics and "gerund".

also, there are hundreds of impersonal sentence endings that
should be used instead of verbs personal statement. and
those are not in the books, you have to learn them in the
conversation. i found it the hard bit of japanese.

--------------------------------------
<<
Relative subclauses in Japanese don't need any mark,
and the language uses a lot of those relative clauses with
some nouns
to make
sentence subclauses (with "toki": time, moment - usually
followed
by "ni" - you
get "when", "koto": (abstract) thing is used also for
nominalisation
of
clauses, but in the sense of "the fact that...").
-----------------------------------------

i'm thinking that since you say that "no" comes from "mono",
maybe the "to" clitic above comes from "koto"?

---------------------------------------
That's how I handle relative clauses in my conlang...

<< PS: is it me, or are my explanations pretty confuse
lately? I can
hardly re-
read myself! >>

Not particularly :) Everyone gets confusing sometimes...
---------------------------------------
kuristohu san ga setsumei shite kurete itsumo meiseki na sou
da sou desu.
i have heard that your explanations always seem very clear.
:-)

Mathias