Re: Heavy constituents in left-branching langs

Hi!

JR writes:
> 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). Wouldn't you be misleading the listener, so
> they'd attribute the whole quote to you until you finally got to the end?
> It's one thing in literature, where even English routinely has
> "'...........,' she said." But there you have quotation marks to clue you
> in. How could you do that in speech though? Is this just my mother-tongue
> bias acting up? I know that languages (English included) will sometimes
> shift around heavy constituents for clarity - but does this go for strictly
> left-branching languages? What do langs like Japanese do, that never (AFAIK)
> place anything after the verb? Make two sentences out of it? Stick in a
> quotation mark particle? Do some weird kind of clefting?
>
> Any ideas?
Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Errm, no, of course.  Verb last:

Zarathustra thus spoke: ...

I.e., have a full clause as in introduction to the quotation.

**Henrik

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