<div dir="ltr">SuStel: I presume you read this post of Alan Anderson's from last September and have been giving it thought: <a href="http://diswww.mit.edu/charon.MIT.EDU/ja'chuq/110966">http://diswww.mit.edu/charon.MIT.EDU/ja'chuq/110966</a><br>I was more than a little surprised that his post did not elicit further comment, but perhaps it required some time to digest. I find your speculation both surprising and welcome, due to what has seemed to me to be your arch-conservatism in these matters, though I may have been mistaken in that regard.<br><div><br>I don't have a problem with the description you cite of the relative clause in TKD. I see a relative clause as being like an adjective that describes the noun. One can say either <b>Duj Doq vIlegh</b> or <b>Doqbogh Duj vIlegh</b> <i>(I see the red ship</i> or <i>I see the ship that is red</i>). The difference as I see it is akin to how English uses a comma to separate a relative clause that merely provides additional information while not doing so with one that is necessary
to identify the noun. But of course TKD describes itself as a grammatical sketch, leaving wiggle-room, which is something Okrand evidently wants, and who can blame him?<br><br></div><div>If as you suggest (or speculate or advocate: it's all fine as long as no one pretends to authority that is not his), the locative (or for that matter causative) noun of the relative clause can be the object of the main clause, couldn't it be the subject as well? Then one could say <b>Saq DujDaq jIHaw'bogh</b> <i>The ship on which I fled landed</i>. What do you make of this?<br><br></div><div>I see another major problem, besides the main verb being able to "see" into the relative clause, and one which is not totally unrelated to the problem of whether a preceding modifier acts on a relative clause preceding the main clause or on the main clause. (Example: <b>vengDaq jIlwI' ghaHpu' loD'e' vIlegh</b> Does it mean <i>I saw the man who had been my neighbor in the city</i> or <i>In the city, I saw the man who had been my neighbor</i>?) The example you use has only one possible candidate for head noun. If there's only one candidate for head noun, it could conceivably fill some other slot in the main clause, but if there are more than one, which gets priority? (Alan's post I referred to above suggests a way around this dilemma in at least some cases.)<br><br></div><div>The choppy short sentence technique (which you have advocated most persuasively) also seems to offer a way around the problem: your
<b>DujDaq jIHaw'bogh vIngu'laH</b>
<i>I can identify
the ship in which I fled</i>
could simply be rendered as
<b>DujDaq jIHaw' vIngu'laH</b><i> I fled in a ship. I can identify it.</i> English speakers might consider the first sentence pedantic if the listener already knows the speaker fled in a ship, but Klingons might have no problem with this way of recapping known information. It also has the virtue of brevity.<br><br></div><div>Lastly, (and I am confident that you won't like this, so please do not let this derail the thread) but your argument that a noun can have another syntactic role in the main clause because it's the only candidate for head noun of a relative clause reminds me of an argument I made for the combination of {-lu'} and {-wI'} to nominalize on the object because it is the only candidate, the subject being pointedly moot.<br><br></div><div>~mIp'av<br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 4:29 PM, SuStel <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sustel@trimboli.name" target="_blank">sustel@trimboli.name</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<p>A conversation on DuoLingo got me thinking. Okrand said long ago
that he could not get the head noun of a relative clause to fit
anywhere except as the subject or object of that clause. We accept
this as meaning Klingon doesn't allow this, though all Okrand
really said was he couldn't see how to do it.</p>
<p>Consider the text of <i>The Klingon Dictionary:</i> "The whole
construction (relative clause plus head noun), as a unit, is used
in the sentence as a noun." I don't know about you, but this is
not the mental image of relative clauses I have in my head. I
imagine the main clause as a line, the head noun "pinned" to its
place on that line, and the relative clause dangling off of the
pinned head noun. But the text of TKD may suggest a different
picture: the head noun plus verbal clause may be an enclosed
package, no dangling, and whatever is part of the relative clause
is isolated from interaction with the main clause. The main
sentence, in other words, doesn't care what part the relative
clause is the head noun; all it cares about is that something
called "relative clause" is acting as a noun in a particular spot.<br>
</p>
<p>For example, if <b>Duj vIleghpu'bogh</b> <i>ship which I saw</i>
is said to be equal to <i>X,</i> then we can insert it into a
main clause <b>vIngu'laH</b><i> I can identify it</i> like so: <i><b>X</b></i><b>
vIngu'laH</b> <i>I can identify X.</i> As far as the main
clause is concerned, <i>X</i> is a black box, internally any noun
phrase it wants to be.</p>
<p>So, let's suppose we start with a phrase, <b>DujDaq jIHaw'</b><i>
I flee on a ship.</i> Let's us further suppose... and bear with
me here... that we don't have to make the head noun the subject or
object of the relative clause. What if we can say <b>DujDaq jIHaw'bogh</b><i>
ship on which I flee.</i> Being the only noun in the clause,
it's the only candidate for head noun. Let's suppose that it is.
Just suppose.</p>
<p>Now just take the noun phrase as a black box and stick it into
the main sentence, <b>vIngu'laH</b><i> I can identify it.</i><b>
</b>We get: <b>DujDaq jIHaw'bogh vIngu'laH</b> <i>I can identify
the ship in which I fled. </i>As far as the main sentence goes,
this is not a locative, just a regular noun phrase.<br>
<i></i></p>
<p>Yes, yes, I realize that the listener has no idea that <b>DujDaq
jIHaw'bogh</b> is supposed to be a unit and that I'm not
actually identifying something while I'm on a ship. I remember
that Okrand didn't agree to this in his interview. All I'm saying
is, it doesn't <i>actually</i> contradict TKD, and Okrand didn't
<i>actually</i> say you can't do it. The phrasing used in TKD
makes such a construction not completely impossible.</p>
<p>There's one major problem with this idea: if you need to use
main-sentence syntactic suffixes on the relative clause, you have
to attach them to the head noun, which means the main sentence <i>does</i>
see the inner parts of the relative clause, so it's not really a
black box after all.</p>
<p>Note: I'm not advocating for this idea here. I'm just publicly
speculating. The Ship In Which I Fled Problem is one of those
things that I constantly run up against and would like to pound
into the ground.<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
</font></span></p><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<pre class="m_-309583909014516706moz-signature" cols="72">--
SuStel
<a class="m_-309583909014516706moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://trimboli.name" target="_blank">http://trimboli.name</a></pre>
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