Re: Genitives NPs as Relative Clauses

En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

>
> Japanese.  _No_ is both a genitive particle and a relative clause
> marker
> (also, informally, a question marker).  For example:
>
> Watashi wa otoko ga jitensha o nusumu NO  o mimashita
> I     topic man  nom bicycle acc steal NO acc. saw
> I saw a man stealing a bicycle
>
> Or
>
> Hara-san ga Furansu ni tenkin suru NO o kikimashita
> Hara-san nom France dat transfer   NO acc heard
> I heard THAT Mr. Hara is going to be transfered to France
>
> Altho that might not be exactly what you meant.
>
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). 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...").

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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