Relative clauses (Was: Re: Help: Syntax)

On Wed, Jul 24, 2002 at 09:23:26AM -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
[snip]
> Relative clauses are used to circumscribe a noun (or in some cases,
> another phrase), just like adjectives in English.  So, for example,
> the set of all dogs is larger than the set of all black dogs: the
> adjective black formally serves to constrict the noun to a subset
> relation.  Relative clauses do precisely the same thing.  In fact,
> in Phaleran, as in some natural languages, there is no formal
> difference between adjectives and relative clauses, since except for
> only a handful of particles (mostly number and color terms), all
> "adjectives" are verbs, and can only be used to thus constrict
> nouns as relative clauses.
Cool! In Ebisedian, there are no real adjectives; the adjectival
relationship is expressed using idiomatic juxtapositions of different noun
cases. Obviously, this cannot happen in the middle of another sentence;
hence, all adjectival expressions in Ebisedian are relative clauses
(except for compound words which involves prefixing nouns with the radix
form of certain words).

I was a bit worried about this fact before, but I'm glad to hear that
Ebisedian isn't the only language that uses relative clauses that often.
:-)

>  I wrote the following to the list some time back:
>
> <http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0108B&L=conlang&P=R7404>
[snip]

Nice.

In Ebisedian, the only possible way to express the role of a relative
pronoun is to prefix the modified noun with the auxilliary particle _di_,
which is inflected for the case role of the noun in the relative clause.
Since relative clauses always appear before the noun, the "relative
pronoun" (or particle) can only ever appear at the *end* of a relative
clause. Is this normal? :-)


T

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programmer is a device for turning spaghetti into computer programs.

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