Re: Heavy constituents in left-branching langs

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.")

LEF

...P.S.: sooo happy that I didn't need to look up any of those words.
Am I becoming fluent, or what?...

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