"Relative clauses" with no relativized ele

E.G. eitan.eg at gmail.com
Fri Sep 10 17:54:06 UTC 2010


Hi all,

I'd agree with Arie Verhagen. But there's a way that cross-linguistic
comparison can help what seems to be a purely theoretical question based on
a single language. The problem here is that English uses the same element to
mark regular relatives and these "appositional" relatives. But if at least
one language encodes them by different means, then there's at least a good
case for seeing them as distinct functions. It's basically the same
principle that's used to decide whether to put a meaning on a semantic map.
So here are two languages that I know that encode them differently.

In Modern Hebrew, these clauses can be encoded as a dedicated complement
clause (ki), which differs from the relative clause marker (Se-), e.g.

ha-hoda'a Se-kibalnu
the-announcment rel-we_got
"The announcement that we got."

ha-hoda'a ki hitbatel ha-mifgaS
the-message CMP was_cancelled the-meeting
"The announcement that the meeting was cancelled."

In Coptic, these clauses are marked by ce-, which marks complement clauses,
*inter alia*, but not relative clauses:

ph-mewi ce- (complement clause)
'the-thought that (we are angry)'

ph-mewi ete- (relative clause)
'the thought that (we used to think)'

This seems to be a pretty clear indication that these are complement clauses
rather than relatives. Even if one doesn't like the notion of nouns taking
complement clauses (and why not? nominalizations in some languages can take
accusative modifiers as well as genitives), it still probably isn't
incidental that the nominalizations are of verbs that take complement
clauses when finite.

As usual, the perspective in Talmy Givón's *Syntax* (vol. 2) is worth
looking at.

Best,
Eitan


On 10 September 2010 19:21, Arie Verhagen
<Arie.Verhagen at hum.leidenuniv.nl>wrote:

> And as another addition: the clauses that can only be introduced by *that*
> (with no role to
> play in the subordinate clause) may be seen as (subtypes of) complement
> clauses,
> expressing a proposition with the noun functioning as Complement Taking
> Predicate (CTP),
> expressing a propostional attitude, epistemic/evaluative stance, etc.
> (following analyses by
> Thompson, Diessel, Langacker, myself, and others), i.e. not relatives. Cf.
> constructions like
> "The claim is that X" (traditionally analysed as subject clauses), "I claim
> that X", "I put forward
> the claim that X", in which the relationship between the verb or noun and
> the that-clause is
> comparable to the one in "The claim that X".
>
> --Arie Verhagen
>
> ----------------
> Message from Rong Chen <rchen at csusb.edu>
> 10 Sep 2010, 23:42
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] "Relative clauses" with no relativi
>
> > To add to Joanne's comments:
> >
> > There are basically three ways to distinguish an appositive clause
> > (AC) from a relative clause (RC).
> >
> > 1) An AC can only be led by *that* while an RC can be led by other
> > pronouns.
> >
> > 2) The AC and the noun it modifies display an equative relationship--one
> can say X
> > (denoted by the noun) is Y (presented by the appositive)--while an RC
> often doesn't
> > (except, perhaps, when the relative clause is sentential).
>
> > 3)--which Tom noted--*that* is not part of the clause in an AC; but a
> relative pronoun
> > is always part of the clause in an RC.
> >
> > Rong Chen
> >
>
>


-- 
Eitan Grossman
Martin Buber Society of Fellows
Hebrew University of Jerusalem



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