[Lingtyp] Relativization

[Bernard Comrie]

Dear Jeff:

Some thoughts on your post.

The chapters in WALS are necessarily very brief, so often it will be 
necessary to look at other literature.

As many people have noted, including me back in an early publication on 
European-type relative clauses (Comrie 1998: 79), the European-type 
relative clause has recently (e.g. through colonialism) spread through 
contact to languages outside Europe. These are of course not independent 
instances of the development of this kind of relative clause.

I went into somewhat more detail on possible independent candidates for 
European-type relative clauses in Comrie (2006). If you compare this 
article with WALS, please note that the publication details are 
misleading; some points discussed in the 2006 article that came up 
during preparatory work on WALS did not find their way into the final 
version of WALS.

Regarding your specific question on Acoma: I'll need to check, as I 
don't have the relevant data immediately to hand.

Best,

Bernard

References

Comrie, B. 1998. Rethinking the typology of relative clauses. /Language 
Design/ 1: 59-86.

Comrie, B. 2006. Syntactic typology: just how exotic ARE European-type 
relative clauses? In Ricardo Mairal and Juana Gil (eds.): /Linguistic 
Universals/, 130-154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



On 2018/3/18 17:26, Jeff Siegel wrote:
>
> Greetings:
>
> In the description of relativization in WALS (features 122A and 123A), 
> the relative pronoun strategy is shown to stand out “as being 
> typically European since it is not found in Indo-European languages 
> spoken outside Europe, and is exceptional more generally outside 
> Europe” (Comrie & Kuteva 2013). This strategy is defined as follows:
>
> “[T]he position relativized is indicated inside the relative clause by 
> means of a clause-initial pronominal element, and this pronominal 
> element is case-marked (by case or by an adposition) to indicate the 
> role of the head noun within the relative clause.” (Comrie & Kuteva 2013)
>
> The only language outside the European area shown to use this strategy 
> is Acoma, Keresan language of New Mexico.
>
> Could anyone lead me to examples of the relative pronoun strategy used 
> in other languages outside Europe? Also, could anyone provide such 
> examples from Acoma or related languages? (I can’t seem to find any in 
> the descriptions of Keresan languages that I have examined.)
>
> Reference:
>
> Bernard Comrie, Tania Kuteva. 2013. Relativization on Subjects. In: 
> Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). /The World Atlas of 
> Language Structures Online./ Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for 
> Evolutionary Anthropology.
> (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/122, Accessed on 
> 2018-03-19.)
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jeff
>
> Emeritus Professor Jeff Siegel
>
> Linguistics, School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
>
> University of New England
>
> Armidale, NSW 2351
>
> Australia
>
> https://www.une.edu.au/staff-profiles/bcss/jsiegel
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp

-- 

Bernard Comrie
Distinguished Faculty Professor of Linguistics, University of California Santa Barbara

E-mail: comrie at linguistics.ucsb.edu
Web site: http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/people/bernard-comrie

Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3100
USA

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20180325/7e6981e8/attachment.htm>