Re: Complement clauses

At 10:47 20/06/03, "David J. Peterson" <ThatBlueCat@...> wrote:

I'm still having fits with this in Zhyler.  I created a Turkish style 
head-final language, which is so backwards from my L1's (English and 
Spanish) that I keep asking myself, "Is it unnatural to think this way?  Or 
is this just my L1 interference?"  Here's an example:

jememben-yf us-lar-al mat-um.

noodle-GEN. eat-PAST-2sg. see-1sg.-PRES.

"I see that you ate some of the noodles."

I'm having headaches over clauses myself, with Holic.  Let's start with one 
of the few sentences I have written in it:

The cow jumped over the moon
Pará zqi cim od has vus-fúg duv pav-vé.

Pará     zqi              cim          od   has     vus-              fúg
Moon.GSg ART.f.inan+1.GSg through-over PAST cow.ESg she.anim.prox.ESg jump

      duv      pav-     vé.
      I.+0.ESg you.+0.A tell.

Literally: I tell you that the cow jumped through the space over a worthy moon.

This illustrates what is probably the most interesting feature (to my mind) 
of the language: that the speech act is always overt.  (Historically this 
arose in response to a rapid loss of verbal inflection.)  Almost all 
sentences therefore have at least two clauses (exceptions occur when the 
dependent clause is understood, and with such things as naming which can be 
done within the speech act clause).

Now Holic is supposed to be an ergative language (I say 'supposed to be' 
because I just thought it would be interesting to try one for a change, but 
I have no experience whatsoever of ergative languages, so quite likely I'm 
making a mess of it).  Roughly speaking a clause goes:

[subordinate clause] [complements] [ergative NP] [various PPs and adverbs] 
absolutive_NP verb [conjunction]

Now, with a speech verb such as _ve_, the speaker goes in the ergative (and 
is omitable) and the the addressee in the absolutive.  But this is where 
the complication arises: the _pará zqi cim od has vus-fúg_ 'that the cow 
jumped over the moon' isn't, it seems, really a complement clause at all, 
in that there is no noun phrase it is replacing.  It's just going into some 
sort of subordinate-clause syntactic slot.  I don't see that this is a 
problem, as such, so far, and I'd really rather keep this pattern for the 
speech verbs, if I can.

But then what do I do with such things as 'I see that you ate some of the 
noodles'?  I had in mind with verbs of perception to put the perceiver in 
the ergative and the perceived in the absolutive, which allows e.g. "it 
tastes sweet" and "it tastes sweet to me" to be a matter of whether 
anything is stuck in the absolutive grammatical slot, which is nice.  But 
then I have here something which is a real complement clause: it is 'that 
you ate some of the noodles which is seen, and so should go in the ergative 
slot.  But I don't want clauses to do that; I think they should always (or 
at least unmarkedly) appear at the beginnning of the superordiate 
clause.  Perhaps an antipassive could do the trick, but I'm not sure how I 
would do that (and in any case I would still have troubles with 'It can be 
seen that you ate some of the noodles'.  So maybe I need some sort of 
filler pronoun which refers back to the clause?

Incidentally, I was thinking of having fronted relative clauses as well; a 
relative cause could be identified by the existence of a relative 
pronoun(?) within it, and the corelative would be marked with an 
adjective(?) in the superordinate clause.

Anyway, thoughts on all this would be *very* welcome - I hope the above is 
clear enough to follow, and that I haven't got myself too confused!

Ian