Re: Genitives NPs as Relative Clauses

Ar 09:09 15/11/01 -0800, bhac nicole dobrowolski le scríobh chugam:

>--- Keith Gaughan froge sionk:
>
> >      Direct relative clause (`that I see'):
> >          ...of my seeing...
>
>well this makes sense to me...
>
> >      Indirect relative clauses (`that sees me'):
> >          ...with my seeing...
>
>but this seems to imply (to me anyway) that it's still you (or the
>owner of my) doing the seeing rather than the one being seen...
But the thing is, `my' is a possessive adjective, not a noun, and it's
attached to `seeing' rather than `with'. Sort of like this:

     [with [my seeing]]

You could rewrite the same thing (awkwardly) as:

     [with [seeing [of me]]]

The square brackets indicating which words are bound to one another.

>to me 'with my seeing' would mean the same as 'of my seeing'...
There's a semantic difference between the prepositions. I'll try and
explain. `With' in this case is more like the word `having', which is
terribly like a preposition itself. If you say `having sight/seeing of
something' it's the same as `with sight/seeing of something'.

If it helps, these sentences might explain, sort of...

   * The sentry having sight of the escapees raised the alarm.

   * The sentry who saw the escapees raised the alarm.

Of course, this is also an idiom in a language besides English so you don't
have to do things exactly the same way as in English with relative pronouns
and the like.

K.

--
Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>
http://homepage.eircom.net/~kmgaughan/
I can decide what I give / But it's not up to me / What I get given -=Bjork=-

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