Re: Heavy constituents in left-branching langs

on 1/7/07 7:02 PM, Lars Finsen at lars.finsen@ORTYGIA.NO wrote:

> Den 7. jan. 2007 kl. 17.14 skrev JR:
>>
>> 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?
>
> Well, the first one I would actually translate: "'Kalakuwe oranjus'
> ini a." And when it's longer, like in your second example, I would
> split it up. Which is pretty customary in English as well, as you
> indicated yourself: "'No!' she said, "Well ...etc."
I indicated that? Where? I agree it's acceptable in English to say "'No!'
she said, "Well ...etc.", as you wrote, but you can only say 'she said'
once, and that may even just be a parenthetical insertion most of the time.
According to the way Gaajan treats speech though, it seems like 'She said "X
Y Z"', where X Y and Z are each different phrase types, would have to be
translated as "She said X, she said Y, she said Z", which I don't think is
acceptable at all in English (unless you're splitting it up for effect, to
prevent the parts sequentially or as a list). Is that an acceptable/natural
way to present it though, in Gaajan? Or would you have to make the quote
into a separate sentence?

> Another natural thing to do, at least if you quote longer speeches,
> is to put it the Nietzschean way that Henrik proposed. That is: a
> separate sentence. In Gaajan the transitive auxiliary implies a
> pronoun if the sentence doesn't contain a direct object, so if you
> separate the quote out by a colon and quotation marks, the 'ini a'
> alone will mean 'she said it' instead of just 'she said'. Thus: "Ini
> a: 'apples and oranges.'" But you can also use 'pad' (this) for
> emphasis: "Pad ini a: 'apples and oranges.'"
>
> Now, the colon and quotation marks of course aren't heard when you
> speak. And Gaajan actually isn't a written language. But complete
> sentences such as the "Ini a:" or "Pad ini a:" above will be
> pronounced with more finality (lower final tone on the auxiliary and
> a longer pause after it) than just an initial clause.  I'm sure your
> conpeople must have something similar.
>
> LEF
So it seems Gaajan converts all direct speech into indirect speech, unless
you want to have it as an independent clause. That's certainly a viable
option ... though I'm not sure if it suits Eloshtan or Kar Marinam.

I came upon a very enlightening paper (at
http://www.uwm.edu/People/noonan/RS%2520paper.pdf) yesterday describing
direct (quoted) speech in Chantyal (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal). This language
does the opposite of yours - it only allows direct speech, and it goes as
far as expressing many complements as direct speech that actually don't
involve speech at all. Here are a couple of example, one from another paper
(without the actual Chantyal, because this program doesn't let me use
Unicode):

I last year Kathmandu-loc go-perf say-nom he-erg remember-perf
'He remembered that he went to Kathmandu last year'
But literally: 'He remembered saying, "I went to Kathmandu last year"'

Kathmandu-loc go-opt say-nom desire come-ant-nom be-impf
'[She] had wanted to go to Kathmandu.'
But literally: 'The desire saying "[I] want to go to Kathmandu" had come.'

'Saying' is used even if the person never said it, and even when the
subject/head is non-human and couldn't have said anything, and the embedded
pronouns/deictics must be from the POV of the head noun, not the speaker!
One might think call it a complementizer, but the author maintains that at
this stage it's still a verb. He gives two reasons which I don't think show
it, but I'd offer instead the facts that it takes verb affixes, and that
'say' can be the matrix verb itself and take a finite complement, with no
additional iteration of the word necessary.

I find that fascinating, but more relevant here are two things:

1) Using the word "saying" is the ONLY way to have a finite complement, and
so any other speech acts will have to use a combination of verbs - 'He
yelled, saying "..."'

Chantyal is more consistently left branching than your or my languages, so
the complement clause with "saying" will still come before the main verb.
This doesn't solve my original problem with introducing speech before the
verb ... BUT if I port this structure over to Eloshtan, in which conjunctive
verbs (which describe the same action of the main verb in a different way,
or an overlapping action) follow the matrix verb, everything works out
nicely:

khilje gist "..." mentelestev.
woman speak-3-Pst "..." say-3-Pst-Conj
'The woman spoke, saying "..."'

It would make sense as well to allow the verb 'gify' to evolve into a
particle 'gi-' to introduce direct speech (there is already a syntactically
and morphologically similar particle to introduce proper nouns), and then
the speech could still be treated as a direct object. I may allow both
options, or split them up by dialect....

In Kar Marinam I might be able to pull off a similar clause chain, but I
have to explore it a bit more.

2) The paper on Chantyal also contains an example that shows it's acceptable
to have a very long quote (39 words in all, and many clauses) preceding the
verb. He does mention though, that the initial subject is pronounced with a
rising tone, and then there's a pause before the quote. The example also
happens to have the speaker saying 'uh' in between the subject and quote,
but the author unfortunately doesn't discuss this, so I don't know if it's
significant or not. The example also has the subject repeated before the
matrix verb at the end of the sentence for clarification, but he says this
is not necessary and that there are other examples without it.

It's good to know for certain now that there are natlang precedents for
having long quotes before verbs.

Josh Roth

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