Relative clause head position

Edith Aldridge eca3 at cornell.edu
Tue Oct 23 22:24:36 UTC 2001


Dear Austronesianists,

I am currently working on relative clause structure in Austronesian
languages.  Some of the languages I am investigating have head-initial,
head-final, and head-internal relative clauses.  For example, the Formosan
language Seediq has the follow three possibilities to express the meaning
"the house that Pawan built".

sapah s-n-malu na Pawan
house -Perf-build Erg Pawan

s-n-malu na Pawan sapah
-Perf-build Erg Pawan house

s-n-malu sapah na Pawan
-Perf-malu house Erg Pawan

My search reveals that several other Formosan languages, as well as
Tagalog, also have the same range of possibilities.  Does anyone know of
other AN languages, particularly outside of Taiwan and the Philippines,
that have this same range of possibilities.  I am particularly interested
in the head-internal possibility.

Thank you,
Edith Aldridge



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