On Tue, Jul 9, 2019 at 9:51 AM SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

TKD doesn't make it clear which words have precedence for the beginning of the sentence. Section 5.4: adverbials "usually come at the beginning of a sentence." Section 6.1: any noun in the sentence other than subject or object comes "before the object noun." Section 6.4: those three question words "occur at the beginning of the sentence." Addendum section 6.7: time elements come before adverbials. Time elements are only described as the most common sort of element to precede an adverbial, so it's possible that other elements can too, though I couldn't tell you what they might be.

Canon doesn't appear to be too overly concerned with carefully ordering these elements. I can't offhand think of any notable exceptions to the general rules, but I'm sure there are some interesting bits out there to find. The trouble is that some of the best stuff is poetic in nature, making word order suspect.

In general, I go by this formula:

<time elements> <adverbials and syntactic noun phrases> <objects> <verb> <subjects>

Adverbials tend to float toward the front of the "adverbials and syntactic noun phrases" part of their space, though I don't think this is an absolute. If you always put adverbials before syntactic noun phrases I don't think you'd have any trouble. The three "beginning of the sentence" question words are essentially adverbial in nature, and should be counted as adverbials for the purpose of sentence order.

What do you mean by "syntactic noun phrases"? Things with Type 5 noun suffixes?

My interpretation: The addendum 6.7 says the adverbial precedes the object-verb-subject construction, so my usual formula is to put it just before the OVS, preceded by timestamps and type-5 nouns (which would still put them before the object noun, as per 6.1). Time stamps come after the type-5s so they don't somehow get confused for being part of the noun phrase. I don't lump the question words in with adverbials, so I put those at the very beginning. So my formula is more:

Here's a related question: Addendum 6.7 says the adverbial can come after the object, if the object has the {-'e'} marker. Would you all say this rule includes situations where the object has an {-'e'} to mark it as the head noun of a relative clause? Something like: {SoSwI' tIchpu'bogh petaQ'e' batlh vIqIp.} "I honorably hit the p'takh who had insulted my mother." As opposed to the usual arrangement, which would be {batlh SoSwI' tIchpu'bogh petaQ'e' vIqIp}, which could be misinterpreted as "I hit the p'takh who had honorably insulted my mother." My confusion is because the {-'e'} applies to the p'takh's role in the relative clause, not the main sentence.

After that question, a related one: What if the object noun were the object of its relative clause? Like {SoSwI''e' tIchpu'bogh petaQ batlh vIHub.}