Re: Heavy constituents in left-branching langs

on 1/7/07 3:43 PM, Lars Finsen at lars.finsen@ORTYGIA.NO wrote:

> Den 7. jan. 2007 kl. 01.17 skrev JR:
>
>> I'm trying to figure out how to deal with lengthy quotations and
>> other heavy
>> constituents in my generally-left-branching conlangs. If you want
>> to say
>> "She said 'blah blah blah....'" and attribute to the subject several
>> sentences or more worth of speech, it just doesn't seem feasible to
>> have all
>> the whole quotation before the verb (especially if the language
>> would also
>> drop the subject pronoun).
>
> My Gaajan also is verb-final, but each verb has its own clause, so a
> quotation is started with "Ini a," (she said), with the transitive
> auxiliary 'a' instead of the intransitive 'ju' indicating that a
> subordinate clause follows. (Or several.) The auxiliaries of the
> subordinates then carry the subjunctive marker.
>
> A quotation isn't really different from any other subordinate clause.
> A sentence like: 'She said, "It is good,"' is quite equivalent to
> "She said that it was good" which in turn is quite parallel to "She
> saw that it was good" for example. (In Gaajan these are,
> incidentially, "Ini a so jula" and "Ure a so jula" respectively,
> while "It is good" is "So ju.")
Eloshtan also has subordinate clauses after the verb, but I consider a
quotation to be an NP. I mean, a quotation doesn't have to have a verb at
all. How would you translate into Gaajan, "She said 'apples and oranges.'"?
Well at least those are nouns, and maybe you'd leave treat them as direct
objects. But what if the quotation had several parts, like "She said 'No!
Well ... maybe.... No! Apples and oranges! That's what I was supposed to
buy.'"? Or what if you wanted to quote something ungrammatical that someone
said, or something in a foreign language?

(Since sub. clauses in Eloshtan do follow the verb, I think it wouldn't be
the end of the world if heavy NPs followed the verb as well. It's more of a
problem in Kar Marinam though, where everything precedes the verb except the
subject in a finite clause.)

> LEF
>
> ...P.S.: sooo happy that I didn't need to look up any of those words.
> Am I becoming fluent, or what?...
The more you use it, the better you get.... :-)

Josh Roth

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