conlanging 13: relative clauses
ok time to knock out the relative clause. this is what the parameters say about it first.
Relative clauses: Relative clauses follow the noun (NRel). Relative clauses are expressed with a noun reduplication strategy. What the hell does this mean?*
it then goes on to have a few paragraphs explaining what relative clauses even are. ill put it here, just cause im working through this as i go.
English uses a relative pronoun strategy to express relative clauses, for instance, in The man [who I know] died, "who" is a relative pronoun that stands in for "the man". In other words, "who I know" can be rearranged into "I know the man". English can also use what's known as a gap strategy where by the relative pronoun is a deleted: The man [I know] died.
Strategies in other languages include the noun reduplication strategy whereby the head noun is reduplicated inside the relative clause, as in: The man [I know the man] died, or a pronoun strategy, as in: The man [I know him] died.
In the first two strategies the structure of the relative clauses is different to the structure of a regular clause; they have been "relativized". In the last two strategies the structure is the same. It has been observed that a language's ability relativize certain types of constituents within the relative clause is constrained along a strict hierarchy of Subject > Direct object > Indirect object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparison. So, if you can relativize one of these you can also relativize everything to left of it nothing to right (at which point you have to employ a different strategy). English can relativize all of them:
Subject: The man [who ran away] died
Direct object: The man [who I know] died
Indirect object: The man [who I gave the letter to] died
Oblique: The man [who I was talking about] died
Genitive: The man [whose sister I know] died
Object of comparative: The man [who I am taller than] died
To unpack this, if you rearrange the relative clauses inside the square brackets to regular clauses you will notice that "who" always stands in for the "the man", however in each case "the man" is filling a different constituent role - subject, direct object, etc.
im not 100% sure what it wants me to do with this. im guessing that this means that if i wanted to say the man who i know i would have to say something that would translate directly to something like the man i know the man instead?
but in all the example, the actual sentence they used is the same in english, with the differences only implied with context, so i dont know what the difference would look like in a language with a noun reduplication strategy instead? couldnt the ‘reduplicated noun’ just drop as well, and so all these sentences would come out the same? and im not sure what that whole 3rd paragraph is getting at either.
in heard of reduplication being used to indicate plurality before, and when i try to search ‘relative clause noun reduplication’ thats what i come up with. i do like wikipedias description of the relative clause strategy in ASL though:
Relative clauses are signaled by tilting back the head and raising the eyebrows and upper lip. This is done during the performance of the entire clause. There is no change in word order.
