appositive relative clauses

[Andrej Malchukov]

Dear Lutz,

In the paper by Johan van der Auwera and me in the depictive volume 
(edited by Nikolaus Himmelmann & Eva Schultze-Berndt) we discuss some 
participial strategies in Tungusic and serial verb constructions in 
Mandarin Chinese, which are used for appositives and depictives, but not 
for restrictive relatives.

best,

Andrej Malchukov


Nigel Vincent wrote:
> Lutz,
> You're right of course that in English, Swedish, Danish and elsewhere 
> we have
> the type, sometimes called a contact relative, in which there is no overt
> marker of relative clause status, but as far as I am aware the crucial 
> property
> of these is that they are always restrictive - i.e. they serve to pick 
> out a
> specific subset of the set identified by the head noun. Moreover even 
> when
> there is no relativizer there is a dependency between the head noun 
> and an
> argument or adjunct in the relative clause.
> I guess my query to you is a hypothesis that in an appositive (or 
> appositional)
> construction there would be nothing to make us want to call it a 
> relative if
> there wasn't a relative pronoun or complementizer present. If I try to 
> imagine
> what such an example would look like, I keep having to insert an overt 
> argument
> to keep track of what's going on - perhaps something like 'Bill, the 
> boss fired
> him, was upset' and then I get very close to a parenthetical. But 
> maybe this is
> just me being anglo (or north/west Germanic) -centric.
> Wolfgang's examples in his second post are very interesting but still
> restrictive rather than appositional in the traditional sense, at 
> least to
> judge by the translations, so I'd agree with him that we need a 
> different term.
> Best,
> Nigel
>
> Quoting Lutz Gunkel <gunkel at ids-mannheim.de>:
>
>> Nigel wrote:
>>
>>> Indeed my question to Lutz would be: if an appositive relative 
>>> doesn't have
>> a relative pronoun or particle why would we want to call it a 
>> relative in
>> the first place?
>>
>> OK. But what about languages where the relative pronoun or particle is
>> optional under certain circumstances. In English and Swedish, for 
>> instance,
>> the relative particle may be omitted in sentences such as (i)
>>
>> (i) Money (that) you have in the bank yields interest.
>>
>> Given that we find structures like (i) with *restrictive* relatives 
>> in some
>> language, is it conceivable that we would find a corresponding structure
>> with *appositive* relatives (in the sense of restrictive and appositive
>> indicated by Nigel)?
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Lutz
>>
>
>
>