ReRe: Arguments vs. adjuncts as heads of relative clauses

[Waruno Mahdi]

> my question. I wanted to be certain that in Standard Indonesian,
> oblique NPs can indeed serve as heads of RCs. I wonder if the same is
> true for Standard Malay and other related languages like Javanese or
> Tagalog.

Thank's Whitney. But I must note that I am not a native speaker of
STANDARD Indonesian, just an observer and user of de facto literary
Indonesian (i.e. those examples were not colloquial or slang anything
like that). I'm not sure about the situation in standard Malay, much
less in Tagalog. But Javanese speakers will probably find the
sentences OK. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that
the construction in (5) and (6) had been the result of influence from
Javanese.

> your translation of (3), the agentive preposition "oleh" were
> removed? In other words, what if the agent "wanita" were incorporated
> (to use terminology from Myhill (1992))? The result would be:
>
> ? Bayi itu sedang digendong wanita [yang menyanyikan  lagu ninabobo]

The sentence is OK, although there is a difference in what the utterance
says. Without the relative clause, the sentence sets a very strong
stress on the circumstance that it is a woman, i.e. not a man, who is
carrying the baby. With the relative clause, it would equally strongly
stress that it is a woman singing a lullaby, and not one singing the
aria of Madame Butterfly or pantun Betawi or something other.
At least, that is how I would grasp the sentence(s).

Now to Paul Kroeger:

>     Are your sentences (5) and (6) accepted as grammatical by all speakers
>     of standard Indonesian?  My impression is that in Bahasa Malaysia, the
>     resumptive pronoun =nya can only be used to relativize possessors, and
>     specifically possessors of subjects.  (I think Comrie makes this point

I'm not quite uptodate on what the latest developments in the official
standard (baku) Indonesian is. But sentences (5) and (6) are normal
for the literary language as it is used in real life. If it is indeed
the result of Javanese influence, however, then it is imaginable that
some native-speakers of Malay from outside Java might raise an eyebrow
at the first time hearing or reading it.

>     Sneddon (1996, sec. 3.88-91) describes the topicalization of
>     possessors using a resumptive pronoun.  He implies that the
.....
>   (a) Sopir itu, nama=nya Pak Ali.
>   (b) Mahasiswa itu, rambut=nya tidak pernah di-sisir.
>   (c) *Mahasiswa itu, polisi telah memotong rambut=nya.

I fully agree with Jim Sneddon on this point (but disisir is one word,
di- here being a prefix, not a proclitic). I wouldn't accept (c) either.

>   (d) %Surat itu, Ali belum menerima=nya.

This one is indeed a border case. I've heard sentences of this kind,
so some speakers obviously consider it permissible, but it doesn't
make me feel comfortable. Though, I wouldn't draw a parallel between
the acceptability of (d) and that of (5-6), because the latter structure
one can meet rather frequently. In (d), the problem mainly derives from
the redundancy of =nya, I think, i.e. it would sound much better without
it:

(d1) Surat itu Ali belum menerima
    'That letter Ali hasn't recieved'

which is merely the result of object fronting from the base structure:

(d2) Ali belum menerima surat itu
    'Ali hasn't recieved that letter'

The only (very light) uneasiness some speakers might have with (d1)
is that many speakers (myself included) would prefer expressing the
same thing with:

(d3) Surat itu Ali belum terima.
    'That letter Ali hasn't recieved'

Note, nevertheless, that this is not the same as:

(d4) Surat itu belum Ali terima
    'that letter I/you haven't recieved'

Only possible if Ali is speaking or being spoken to. In (d4), you
cannot replace terima with menerima.

Sorry this got so long.

Aloha,  Waruno