"Relative clauses" with no relativized ele

[Ron Kuzar]

The Modern Hebrew data supplied by Eitan are incomplete.
Hebrew distinguishes between locution (say, hear, think, etc.) and
situation (action, event, state, etc.).
What Eitan describes is only true with regard to nouns (and clauses)
expressing locution. 'Announcement' is indeed such a noun.
Words such as ba'ya 'problem', macav 'situation', or cara 'trouble',
etc., whose denotatum is a situation, cannot be followed by ki, but only
by Se-, e.g.:

margiz oti ha-macav Se-kulam halxu (*ki kulam halxu)
annoys me the-situation that-all went
'I am upset about the situation that all have gone'

On the other hand, the relative Se- may be replaced by the more
elegant and classical aSer, while the Se- of situation clauses may not.
Sorry about the invented example. I am overseas now.
All this has been described (with corpus data) in:

Kuzar, Ron. 1993. Nominalization Clauses in Israeli Hebrew. Balshanut Ivrit
[Hebrew
Linguistics] 36: 71-89 [unfortunately available only in Hebrew].

The article is somewhat outdated and contains some inaccuracies I would
formulate differently today, but the basic distinction is valid in my
opinion.
Best,
Ron Kuzar
---------------
On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 8:54 PM, E.G. <eitan.eg at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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                    Dr. Ron Kuzar
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