LINGUIST List 4.612

Mon 16 Aug 1993

Qs: Long relatives, Japanese, Lateral affricates

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1. Daniel Buering, Query: Long Relatives
2. Pamela A Downing, Query: Japanese demonstratives and plural markers
3. , Lateral Affricates

Dear List,
 working on the formation of long relative clauses (or the impossibility
thereof), we are looking for languages which do NOT allow for the formation
of long relatives, i.e. languages in which the counterpart of the English
 the man who I think (that) I saw t
would be ungrammatical (as it is e.g. in German).

In particular, we are interested in cases where
i) the impossibility of long relativization contrasts with the possibility
 of short relativization from the same grammatical function, and/or
ii) the impossibility of long relativization contrasts with the possibility
 of long topicalization and/or wh-movement.

Please respond to us directly. We will post a summary, if the number of
responses suggest that the topic is of general interest.
Thanks in advance,
 Katharina Hartmann (hartmannlingua.uni-frankfurt.dbp.de)
 Daniel Buering (amd01rs2.rrz.uni-koeln.de)

Could any native Japanese speakers out there help me sort out the
constraints on demonstrative articles and plural markers? Consider the
following sentences (from real texts):

 1) Kao o agetara, otoko no ko ga sannin tatte te, ... de SONO OTOKO NO KO
ga ... koo ... nanka ... koboreta kudamono o hirotte kuretari, ...

 Question #1: Does SONO OTOKO NO KO in the second sentence here sound
OK? In particular, does it sound OK to omit the TATI on the noun even
thought the referent is obviously plural here?

 2) Heya ni hairu to, misiranu otoko ga sannin matte ita. SONO OTOKO-TATI
ga titi-o torimakoo-to sita toki ni watasi wa muisikini himei o ageta.

 Question #2: Would it sound OK to drop the TATI in the second sentence
here? If not, why not? Does it have anything to do with the selectional
restrictions on torimaku?

Taisoo osewa ni narimasita! Pamela Downing
 downingconvex.csd.uwm.edu

Does anybody know of a case where lateral affricates derive
historically from something else, notably (but not necessarily)
from aspirated or velarized ([tx] and the like) coronals?