[Lingtyp] Aspect as marking strategy for relative clauses

[Zielenbach, M. (Maria)]

Dear colleagues,
I'm sorry to crash the on-going discussion about propositional content with something completely different: I'm looking for languages in which an expression of durative, continuative, frequentative, iterative, habitual, progressive or other imperfective aspect is also used to mark relative clauses.

I think an example will clarify what I mean: In the Mainland North Halmahera languages (Eastern Indonesia), finite verbs in relative clauses are reduplicated in most cases; see Modole example below (relative clause in square brackets, NH = non-human, A = actor, U = undergoer, NM = noun marker).
    
    Yai,     o       inomo [i               hemo~hemo]  ni                            diai-ou
    Mother NM  food    3NH.A   RDPL~sweet]  2SG.A>1SG.U   make-ALREADY
    'Mother, make delicious food for me'

Reduplication, among other functions, expresses durative, iterative or habitual aspect and I assume a
connection to the very frequent presence of reduplicated verbs in relative clauses. Dynamic predicates occur in relative clauses as well, not only "adjectival" ones as in the example.
Early 20th century Dutch missionary linguists described such reduplicated forms as participles since they resemble to use of participles (and gerunds) in relative clauses in European languages. However, the reduplicated verbs in Mainland North Halmahera are finite.

I'm grateful for references to languages from all across the world. Or, if you happen to have a good crosslinguistic overview on relative clauses and you are sure you have never seen this strategy before, I would be happy to hear for you as well.

Just to be clear: I am not interested in languages where finite verbs in relative clauses can be marked
for aspect (as in English), but languages where the aspect seems to signal a relative clause. I’m
also not interested in languages that use non-finite forms to construct relative clauses.

Thank you very much and best wishes,
Maria

Maria Zielenbach
PhD student (OUTOFPAPUA project), Language, Literature and Communication
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

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