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User:Shlomital, I reverted your deletions on Hebrew punctuation, as what you deleted was not wrong and not insignificant. If you'd like to clarify it or add to it, go ahead, but it's simply wrong to say (as your edit summary implied) that commas are never used for restrictive clauses. You can note changing tendencies, recommendations of the Hebrew Academy (if it addressed this issue), but plenty of people still use commas in their restrictive clauses - indeed, from what I've seen, many more do than do not - and it's not appropriate to simply delete reference to that. Ruakh 04:41, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
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)
I don't speak a word of Japanese, so I'm on wobbly ground here, but the explanations provided under those examples make me wonder whether they are relative clauses at all. In German you can avoid a relative clause by using an adjectival construction (instead of "the house that Jack built" you can say "the by-Jack-built house"). This is not a relative, though it carries the same meaning. It sounds to me like those Japanese examples are doing something similar. If not, the explanation needs to be better. -- Doric Loon 07:02, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Please don't add any of that, since it has nothing to do with relative clauses. Я Madler גם זה יעבור R 03:04, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
While I did (and do) support the move from relative pronoun to relative clause, I think we should move some things back to relative pronoun. For example, I think the section on English really should explain only the following:
and leave the rest to relative pronoun.
The French, German, and Spanish sections can all be shortened considerably, as they really only need to mention the use or non-use of commas, and what factors affect choice of relative pronoun (without going into detail about which relative pronouns are used in which circumstances).
The Hebrew section should be modified to emphasize the dual nature of asher and she- as relative pronouns and relativizers.
What do you all think? Ruakh 15:50, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
OK, you've gone ahead and done this, and the resulting split looks fine, except:
For older discussion, see Talk:Relative clause/Archive1. Topics discussed there include:
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)
1. "The antecedent of the relative clause (that is, the noun that is modified by it) can in theory be the subject of the main clause, or its object, or any other verb argument." First, I think using the term 'main clause' here is misleading - a relative clause is by definition (as far as I can tell!) never a main clause, at least in the usage with which I am familiar. I think either 'relative clause' or just 'clause' would be better. Second, the term 'argument' does not generally include temporal phrases such as 'the day' or locative/directional phrases such as 'the place' (which are normally called adjuncts), and therefore this definition would suggest that "the day I met him" or "the place I met him" are not possible. I suppose the other reading of the sentence is that the whole noun phrase+relative clause can itself be any argument of the clause containing it, but I don't think this is what was intended, especially given what is said in the sentence following it.
2. "A restrictive (or defining, or integrated) relative clause is one that restricts the reference of the noun it modifies, that is, that makes it definite." How does it make it definite? The 'phrase' "man I saw yesterday" is surely not definite, and yet this consists of a noun plus a relative clause restricting its reference. Adding 'the' would of course make it definite, but adding 'a' would not. If anything, the RC restricts the set of entities to which the phrase could possibly refer.
3. "The main clause in (2) could stand by itself and still convey part of the meaning. The main clause in (1) cannot stand by itself and give the same information, since the point of the relative clause is precisely to define the antecedent." Removing the relative clauses from these sentences has precisely the same effect in both cases: (1') "Jack built the house" and (2') "Jack built a big house". I don't think the RRC defines the antecedent in any way that the NRRC does not. I can see the point of what is being said; I just don't think it's very precise.
4. I think the use of the term 'relative pronoun' is a bit confusing here. (I was certainly confused!) It seems to cover two distinct items here: true relative pronouns (the wh-words) and complementisers ('that'). I realise that this is very much a 'generative' perspective, but I think it would be unwise to ignore it in a serious article on grammar (and it is quite well-motivated).
I would make changes, but I thought I'd ask for your thoughts on these things first, as I may have missed something. Thanks. Matve 11:42, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand your objection no. 1, Matve. The antecedent of the relative pronoun is not in the relative clause, it is in the main clause. Of course a relative clause cannot itself be a main clause. But it refers back to a main clause. The antecedent is part of the main clause, and is usually either the subject or the object thereof. I do agree that I am not thrilled about the word argument, which is used in a technical way most readers will not understand. But I think you are underestimating the difference between a relative clause which restricts/defines and one which does not. To me they are worlds apart. -- Doric Loon 16:18, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
Here, "He" is the antecedent, and is the subject of the main clause. -- Yejianfei ( talk) 11:25, 2 May 2019 (UTC)He (antecedent), who likes cat, is my brother.
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)
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)
What about "I know who said that"? There is a relative pronoun, so it is a relative clause, but in the role of an object instead of an attribute ("modifying a noun"). This article seems to be about attributive relative clauses. (I have to add that I am a native German speaker – is the term used differently in English?)
As an aside: Even if we are talking about attributive relative clauses here, what about "He to whom I have written..."? That's a clause modifying a pronoun, no? -- ἀνυπόδητος ( talk) 19:55, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
2012-2-12 Since the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is cited elsewhere in the article (on the question of whether "that" is a relative pronoun or just a general clause subordinator), it might be worth mentioning that they don't regard participial noun-modifiers (e.g. in "The man walking home saw me" or "The man struck by a car saw me") as relative clauses. They explain why on p1265 - there is no relative pronoun or missing "that" involved and no way of supplying one without supplying a finite verb as well. On the other hand, they do recognise infinitival relative clauses (e.g. "a man in whom to confide", "a brush to paint with"), yet there is no mention of those in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.209.132.179 ( talk) 23:06, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
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)
BTW, I think some fact checking may be needed of the "old" analsis. For example, it says (or rather, said) this:
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)
The section "Strategies for joining the relative clause to the main clause" says
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)
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)
The article states:
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)
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)
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)
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)
The notion underlying the "A free relative clause" is a head-scratcher. If we assume that a relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies the noun to which it relates, and there is no noun referent, there can be no justifying what as a relative pronoun in the "I like what I see" example or any similar examples. In my view, (a) "What I see" merely functions as the target of the verb, "like," in the given example, and (b) "what" function as a garden-variety pronoun. IMHO, the entire "A free relative clause" section ought to be deleted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kent Dominic ( talk • contribs) 02:44, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
I like what I see. = I like the thing that I see.
Therefore, it is a relative clause. The object, or the antecedent, is omitted. --
Yejianfei (
talk)
11:32, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
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)
The citation for Lehmann's Der Relativsatz is:
Lehmann, Christian (1984). Der Relativsatz [Relative Clauses]. Language universals series; vol. 3 (in German). Tübingen: G. Narr. p. 438.
In fact, p. 438 is the very last page of Lehmann's book. So when the article says:
In other languages, relative clauses may be marked in different ways: they may be introduced by a special class of conjunctions called relativizers, the main verb of the relative clause may appear in a special morphological variant, or a relative clause may be indicated by word order alone.
and cites Lehmann for this information, there is no way of finding where in the 438 pages of this book the information is given. Unless Darigon Jr., who added the source, can provide pages on which this information is to be found, I will delete the source from the article. Bathrobe ( talk) 19:27, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
The current article contains:
”English can relativize all positions in the hierarchy. Here are some examples of the NP and relative clause usage from English: […] Languages that cannot relativize directly on noun phrases low in the accessibility hierarchy can sometimes use alternative voices to "raise" the relevant noun phrase so that it can be relativized.”
The section containing this text begins with focussing on the role in the higher-ranking clause and then shifts focus to that in the lower-ranking clause. Even the introduction to the examples in […] seems to refer to the role in the higher-ranking clause.
But … the first groep of examples does not seem to vary with respect to the role of the relativized entity in the higher-ranking clause. Rather, it seems to focus om the role in the lower-ranking clause. That confuses me.
Only the second group of examples in […] seems to focus on role differences in the higher-ranking clause.
I think the text could do with a more explicit distinction between the clause rank the roles in which are discussed. Redav ( talk) 10:21, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
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)
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User:Shlomital, I reverted your deletions on Hebrew punctuation, as what you deleted was not wrong and not insignificant. If you'd like to clarify it or add to it, go ahead, but it's simply wrong to say (as your edit summary implied) that commas are never used for restrictive clauses. You can note changing tendencies, recommendations of the Hebrew Academy (if it addressed this issue), but plenty of people still use commas in their restrictive clauses - indeed, from what I've seen, many more do than do not - and it's not appropriate to simply delete reference to that. Ruakh 04:41, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
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)
I don't speak a word of Japanese, so I'm on wobbly ground here, but the explanations provided under those examples make me wonder whether they are relative clauses at all. In German you can avoid a relative clause by using an adjectival construction (instead of "the house that Jack built" you can say "the by-Jack-built house"). This is not a relative, though it carries the same meaning. It sounds to me like those Japanese examples are doing something similar. If not, the explanation needs to be better. -- Doric Loon 07:02, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Please don't add any of that, since it has nothing to do with relative clauses. Я Madler גם זה יעבור R 03:04, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
While I did (and do) support the move from relative pronoun to relative clause, I think we should move some things back to relative pronoun. For example, I think the section on English really should explain only the following:
and leave the rest to relative pronoun.
The French, German, and Spanish sections can all be shortened considerably, as they really only need to mention the use or non-use of commas, and what factors affect choice of relative pronoun (without going into detail about which relative pronouns are used in which circumstances).
The Hebrew section should be modified to emphasize the dual nature of asher and she- as relative pronouns and relativizers.
What do you all think? Ruakh 15:50, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
OK, you've gone ahead and done this, and the resulting split looks fine, except:
For older discussion, see Talk:Relative clause/Archive1. Topics discussed there include:
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)
1. "The antecedent of the relative clause (that is, the noun that is modified by it) can in theory be the subject of the main clause, or its object, or any other verb argument." First, I think using the term 'main clause' here is misleading - a relative clause is by definition (as far as I can tell!) never a main clause, at least in the usage with which I am familiar. I think either 'relative clause' or just 'clause' would be better. Second, the term 'argument' does not generally include temporal phrases such as 'the day' or locative/directional phrases such as 'the place' (which are normally called adjuncts), and therefore this definition would suggest that "the day I met him" or "the place I met him" are not possible. I suppose the other reading of the sentence is that the whole noun phrase+relative clause can itself be any argument of the clause containing it, but I don't think this is what was intended, especially given what is said in the sentence following it.
2. "A restrictive (or defining, or integrated) relative clause is one that restricts the reference of the noun it modifies, that is, that makes it definite." How does it make it definite? The 'phrase' "man I saw yesterday" is surely not definite, and yet this consists of a noun plus a relative clause restricting its reference. Adding 'the' would of course make it definite, but adding 'a' would not. If anything, the RC restricts the set of entities to which the phrase could possibly refer.
3. "The main clause in (2) could stand by itself and still convey part of the meaning. The main clause in (1) cannot stand by itself and give the same information, since the point of the relative clause is precisely to define the antecedent." Removing the relative clauses from these sentences has precisely the same effect in both cases: (1') "Jack built the house" and (2') "Jack built a big house". I don't think the RRC defines the antecedent in any way that the NRRC does not. I can see the point of what is being said; I just don't think it's very precise.
4. I think the use of the term 'relative pronoun' is a bit confusing here. (I was certainly confused!) It seems to cover two distinct items here: true relative pronouns (the wh-words) and complementisers ('that'). I realise that this is very much a 'generative' perspective, but I think it would be unwise to ignore it in a serious article on grammar (and it is quite well-motivated).
I would make changes, but I thought I'd ask for your thoughts on these things first, as I may have missed something. Thanks. Matve 11:42, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand your objection no. 1, Matve. The antecedent of the relative pronoun is not in the relative clause, it is in the main clause. Of course a relative clause cannot itself be a main clause. But it refers back to a main clause. The antecedent is part of the main clause, and is usually either the subject or the object thereof. I do agree that I am not thrilled about the word argument, which is used in a technical way most readers will not understand. But I think you are underestimating the difference between a relative clause which restricts/defines and one which does not. To me they are worlds apart. -- Doric Loon 16:18, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
Here, "He" is the antecedent, and is the subject of the main clause. -- Yejianfei ( talk) 11:25, 2 May 2019 (UTC)He (antecedent), who likes cat, is my brother.
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)
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)
What about "I know who said that"? There is a relative pronoun, so it is a relative clause, but in the role of an object instead of an attribute ("modifying a noun"). This article seems to be about attributive relative clauses. (I have to add that I am a native German speaker – is the term used differently in English?)
As an aside: Even if we are talking about attributive relative clauses here, what about "He to whom I have written..."? That's a clause modifying a pronoun, no? -- ἀνυπόδητος ( talk) 19:55, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
2012-2-12 Since the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is cited elsewhere in the article (on the question of whether "that" is a relative pronoun or just a general clause subordinator), it might be worth mentioning that they don't regard participial noun-modifiers (e.g. in "The man walking home saw me" or "The man struck by a car saw me") as relative clauses. They explain why on p1265 - there is no relative pronoun or missing "that" involved and no way of supplying one without supplying a finite verb as well. On the other hand, they do recognise infinitival relative clauses (e.g. "a man in whom to confide", "a brush to paint with"), yet there is no mention of those in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.209.132.179 ( talk) 23:06, 11 February 2012 (UTC)
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)
BTW, I think some fact checking may be needed of the "old" analsis. For example, it says (or rather, said) this:
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)
The section "Strategies for joining the relative clause to the main clause" says
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)
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)
The article states:
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)
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)
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)
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)
The notion underlying the "A free relative clause" is a head-scratcher. If we assume that a relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies the noun to which it relates, and there is no noun referent, there can be no justifying what as a relative pronoun in the "I like what I see" example or any similar examples. In my view, (a) "What I see" merely functions as the target of the verb, "like," in the given example, and (b) "what" function as a garden-variety pronoun. IMHO, the entire "A free relative clause" section ought to be deleted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kent Dominic ( talk • contribs) 02:44, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
I like what I see. = I like the thing that I see.
Therefore, it is a relative clause. The object, or the antecedent, is omitted. --
Yejianfei (
talk)
11:32, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
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)
The citation for Lehmann's Der Relativsatz is:
Lehmann, Christian (1984). Der Relativsatz [Relative Clauses]. Language universals series; vol. 3 (in German). Tübingen: G. Narr. p. 438.
In fact, p. 438 is the very last page of Lehmann's book. So when the article says:
In other languages, relative clauses may be marked in different ways: they may be introduced by a special class of conjunctions called relativizers, the main verb of the relative clause may appear in a special morphological variant, or a relative clause may be indicated by word order alone.
and cites Lehmann for this information, there is no way of finding where in the 438 pages of this book the information is given. Unless Darigon Jr., who added the source, can provide pages on which this information is to be found, I will delete the source from the article. Bathrobe ( talk) 19:27, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
The current article contains:
”English can relativize all positions in the hierarchy. Here are some examples of the NP and relative clause usage from English: […] Languages that cannot relativize directly on noun phrases low in the accessibility hierarchy can sometimes use alternative voices to "raise" the relevant noun phrase so that it can be relativized.”
The section containing this text begins with focussing on the role in the higher-ranking clause and then shifts focus to that in the lower-ranking clause. Even the introduction to the examples in […] seems to refer to the role in the higher-ranking clause.
But … the first groep of examples does not seem to vary with respect to the role of the relativized entity in the higher-ranking clause. Rather, it seems to focus om the role in the lower-ranking clause. That confuses me.
Only the second group of examples in […] seems to focus on role differences in the higher-ranking clause.
I think the text could do with a more explicit distinction between the clause rank the roles in which are discussed. Redav ( talk) 10:21, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
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)