Talk:Relative clause

message: Either the Arabic section should be moved first to conform to the alphabetical order of the other languages, or a new ordering scheme should be used. If you do move the Arabic section first, then you'll want to move some of the explanation from the Hebrew section to the Arabic section, and have Hebrew refer to Arabic, rather than the other way around. Ruakh 04:41, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Language ordering

message: For older discussion, see Talk:Relative clause/Archive1. Topics discussed there include:
*Whether that is a relative pronoun, and how best to explain in the article that this is a matter of debate among linguists.
*Whether <preposition> + who is ever heard (or how often it is heard) in actual speech or writing.
*Contact clauses where an internal subject is suppressed (e.g., "the man (who) Jack believes will be king").
*Whether (none) should be included in the article's table of English pronouns, and if so, in which cells. (Note: the table now uses Ø instead of (none), but the question is the same.)
*In "from which I come" and "which I come from," which clause shows the preposition having moved, and which shows it being left in place. (Or, how best to rephrase the article so as to avoid the issue entirely.)
*The use of commas around relative clauses in German, and how best to express it in the article.
*Whether the article had an anti-traditional-grammar POV, and if so, how to neutralize it.
*Such terms as "relative determiner" and "relative pro-form," and how and whether they should be used in the article.
*Whether to move relative pronoun to relative clause. (Note: the page was later moved, which is why you see it here.)
*Whether any languages have distinct relative pronouns (that is, relative pronouns that are never used other than as relative pronouns), whether that's common, and whether and how to mention this in the article.
Note: if you feel the above summary to be non-NPOV in describing any of the discussions, or if there's a point of discussion that I missed, please feel free to modify the summary. Also, if there's a discussion that you think was still active (or that you want to re-activate), please feel free to move it back here from the archive. Thanks! Ruakh 14:52, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, Ruakh, for providing a table of contents here for the archived material. Usually I find that archives' existence is mentioned but without the contents being given, which discourages people from even looking at them.  Duoduoduo (talk) 16:47, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Archive1 

message: In the Irish examples, both DIR-REL and IND-REL is 'a'. Of course this could be correct, but it seems a little odd to maintain (other than for diachronical reaons) a distinction between the two if the form is the same for both. Can anyone shed some light on this? Jalwikip (talk) 18:54, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Synchronically, the direct "a" triggers lenition of a following consonant, while indirect "a" triggers eclipsis of a following sound (see Irish initial mutations). For example, "a language I understand" is teanga a thuigim with lenition of tuigim ("I understand") to thuigim after the direct relative particle, while "a language in which I understand a few words" is teanga a dtuigim cúpla focal inti with eclipsis of tuigim to dtuigim after the indirect relative particle. Also, some irregular verbs make a distinction between "independent" and "dependent" forms (a topic I keep meaning to write an article on, but haven't yet); direct "a" takes the "independent" form while indirect "a" takes the "dependent" form. For example, "The man I saw" is An fear a chonaic mé with the independent form chonaic of the verb for "saw", while "The man whose son I saw" is An fear a bhfaca mé a mhac with the dependent form bhfaca of the verb for "saw". —Angr 19:16, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This is rather fascinating, and although perhaps not all for this article, it should be included somewhere. Thanks for the quick reply. Jalwikip (talk) 20:13, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irish examples 

message: This needs copyediting, and AFAIK what it says is true of Swedish too: 
In other Germanic languages, a relative pronoun is always necessary. In English, however, it may be suppressed in a restrictive clause (as in "The man we met was very friendly"), provided it would not serve as the subject of the main verb. When this is done, if in the unsuppressed counterpart the relative pronoun is the object of a preposition in the relative clause, then said preposition is always "stranded" in the manner described above; it is never moved to the start of the clause. --Espoo (talk) 14:38, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  copyedit necessary 

message: The standard analysis of relative clauses as I learned it separates the strategies into two classes, one describing the relative pronoun or other means of joining the two clauses, and the other describing how the role of the shared noun is indicated in the embedded clause.  This is what is found (AFAIK) in the standard textbooks on linguistic typology (e.g. Bernard Comrie, Jae Jung Song, etc.).  I don't know where the existing ("old") analysis in this page comes from, which describes four main types with no separation of the two strategies.  I think it's clearer in any case to separate them, and so I added this analysis (the "new" one) as the first one described.  I left the "old" one in place afterwards, esp. since it contains some interesting details.  But eventually this should be fixed up. Benwing (talk) 07:41, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Relative pronouns in the strict sense are almost entirely confined to European languages, where they are widespread except among the most conservative Celtic family.
First, I have a hard time believing that relative pronouns are really almost missing in non-European languages.  Certainly, Classical Arabic has a relative pronoun (although it may not be "strict" in the sense that there is no case marking of the embedded role on the relative pronoun — there is only case marking on the dual, and it agrees with the role in the matrix clause; but, spoken English also has no case marking of the relative pronoun, since few people say "whom" and hardly any of those use it in a prescriptively "correct" way, Latin-style).  Secondly, Celtic is hardly "most conservative" among IE languages (hence, I removed this peacock term entirely).  Third, other branches lack Latin-style relative pronouns (e.g. the Indo-Aryan languages, with correlative pronouns). Benwing (talk) 07:51, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

text: Bc bc of my health insurance insurance 2001:4C4C:19DF:4600:5C15:81AE:8B3C:9852 (talk) 10:14, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "old" and "new" analyses 

message: The section "Strategies for joining the relative clause to the main clause" says 
:"The following are some of the common strategies for joining the two clauses [relative clause and main clause]: Use of an indeclinable particle (a complementizer) inserted into the sentence....for example, in English with the word that ("the main that I saw")"
Two things puzzle me about this passage. First, it implies to me that "indeclinable particle" and "complementizer" are synonyms, whereas the lede of the article complementizer defines "complementizer" as "a syntactic category (part of speech) roughly equivalent to the term 'subordinating conjunction' in traditional grammar."  These seem to conflict, since particles are a broader concept than subordinating conjunctions.
Second, the passage in the present article treats "that" as something other than a relative pronoun in "the main that I saw", relative pronouns being covered in the next paragraph after this  passage, as a different strategy. I'd never heard of that treatment before, but according to this discussion in the archives of this talk page (dated 19 and 20 Mar 2005), there is a strand of thought that advocates that treatment. But without further explanation, the passage's assumption that that treatment is correct (and implicitly uncontroversial) will be confusing to someone who is used to analyzing it as a relative pronoun. 
Can someone (1) justify or change the phrase "indeclinable particle", and (2) put in something about the fact that this treatment of "that" (a) exists in the literature and (b) is not universally accepted? Duoduoduo (talk) 16:47, 7 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition of "complementizer" and analysis of "that" 

message: The article states that languages with many politeness distinctions allow more gaps than languages without this politeness distinction. It doesn't seem likely to me that these two phenomena are connected so I added a "citation needed". --Merijn2 (talk) 17:07, 14 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Politeness and relative clauses 

message: The article states:
:In other Germanic languages, a relative pronoun is always necessary. In English, however, it may be suppressed in a restrictive clause (as in "The man [whom] we met was very friendly"), provided it would not serve as the subject of the main verb (the relative pronoun is mandatory in "He is the person who saw me"). When the relative pronoun is omitted, if in the unsuppressed counterpart the relative pronoun is the object of a preposition in the relative clause, then said preposition is always "stranded" in the manner described above ("That is the doctrine I believe in"); it is never moved to the start of the clause (so "That is the doctrine in I believe" never occurs).
This is not true — the equivalent Swedish phrase, "mannen [som] vi mötte var väldigt vänlig", is perfectly valid. Am I missing something here...? ✎ HannesP · talk 19:15, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  English vs. other Germanic languages 

message: The first sentence currently says "A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. But I don't believe this is an adequate definition. For example, in the sentence Lightning struck the church three times, which tested his belief that God controls the weather, I would say that which...weather is a relative clause (yet it does not modify a noun), while that...weather is NOT a relative clause (yet it is a subordinate clause and DOES modify a noun or noun phrase, namely belief or his belief). Victor Yus (talk) 18:49, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Definition of relative clause again

message: I've changed the link of "complementizer" to "relativizer". The two are not the same. A relativizer introduces relative clauses, a complementizer introduces complement clauses. I think that the confusion comes from the fact that, in English, the relativizer "that" has the same form as the complementizer "that". I can give some examples of languages in which the relativizer is a different word than complementizers. 95.93.17.94 (talk) 18:07, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Your statement about English somewhat debatable: the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language argues that the "that" in "the book that I read" (which you would call a "relativizer") is in fact the same "that" as the "that" in "I heard that the book was good" (which you would call a "complementizer"), and not merely two distinct uses having the form. But I agree with your edit: even if in English there's no distinction, there are languages where there is one, and "relativizer" is the better term to use in a cross-linguistic claim. —RuakhTALK 02:51, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. I think the arguments in favor of that as a relativizer (when used to introduce a relative clause) are a bit stronger than those in favor of it as a complementizer.  However, one has to acknowledge that it straddles the two syntactic classes. --Tjo3ya (talk) 17:13, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Complementizer is not the same as relativizer

message: I like grammar and I understand most of this article, but I believe most people would not because they wouldn't understand all the grammar terms. I'd like to simplify the article. I know I'm supposed to be bold, but I'd also like to be polite. Any thoughts on this proposal? DBlomgren (talk) 09:03, 14 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd support making it more accessible, as long as all the existing information is retained somewhere for those who are able to understand it. Victor Yus (talk) 09:20, 14 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I have long wanted to redo this article, but the size of the job is daunting. If you want to give it a go, I can support the effort by providing feedback. I suggest redoing one section at a time and posting each section immediately so I and others can provide feedback. --Tjo3ya (talk) 14:53, 14 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should this be geared to the level of most readers, in others words, should it be simpler? 

message: In one of the examples for the section on Chinese, there seems to be a few words missing in interlinear glosses (i.e. in the example with "（用）今天赢来的钱来付房租"). Here, "来" is matched with fu4 and "pay," when those should actually be under "付." The "来" could actually just be removed entirely; it seems to me that it may have been added by an editor, who forgot to doublecheck it with the other rows of the grid, and thus creating this error. Another mistake is that in the Chinese version, "房租" is together, while in the English annotations "房" and "租" are separate ("house" and "rent"). 
Also, I believe that the translation is a bit off; the translation given in the article is "'the won-today money pays the rent' or 'the money that was won today pays the rent,'" though this is nonsensical; a more accurate and logically correct translation (in the case where 用 is present) would be "use won-today money pay rent" or "to use the money that was won today to pay the rent." This brings me to my next point: here, "用" is necessary. Without it, the phrase is just an object with a verb. If one were to translate it, they would probably translate it as "the money that was won today pays the rent," which, well, happens to be what is written in the article, and like how I said above, it's a nonsensical phrase.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Your + 're (talk • contribs) 02:16, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Errors in gloss of Chinese example 

message: Can you really say that such languages (like German, or even stronger Classical Latin) do employ gapping? Since these languages do include the argument in question in the relative clause by employing the relative pronoun or relative adverb, and there is no fix position for that argument in the remaining parts of the clause, I do not see where should be a gap in such clauses. 2A0A:A541:F78F:0:D830:148B:C1C7:B983 (talk) 15:00, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gapping in languages with relative pronouns or adverbs, and pragmatic word order?