Unit 15. Dependent clauses: introduced with conjunctions

Do not grieve, o Momos, said Isis, for fate has commanded the alternation between darkness and light. – The evil is, replied Momos, that they believe to be in the light.

‘that’-clauses

This unit is concerned with finite clauses that are introduced with subordinating conjunctions (‘conjunctional clauses’), the most interesting one being ‘that’. This conjunction is not to be confused with the relative pronoun ‘that’ in ‘the poodle that barked loudly’ (or the one in the previous sentence). A good test is to replace the clause with a noun or pronoun, most suitably ‘it’, which only works if ‘that’ is a conjunction (but see below).

The difference between a non-finite clause (infinitive or gerund) and a ‘that’-clause can be purely grammatical (‘I want Jacopo to write about his trumpet’, but ‘I assume that Jacopo is writing about his trumpet’). However, ‘that’ frequently refers to the fact as opposed to the action – if I see that someone painted the bridge green, I don’t actually need to have seen them doing it –; so ‘that’-clauses are good candidates for topicalising the affirmative case (which should remind you of the chapter on the preposition ‘about’ in the previous unit).

The outer case of the object that translates the clause is mostly, but not always, an accusative.

Recall the chapter on factive vs. affirmative translation of modal adverbs: if you see ‘Luckily for us, Zarathustra speaks’ as an inversion of ‘We want Zarathustra to speak’, use the factive; if ‘We want that Zarathustra speaks’ comes closer to your meaning, the affirmative is appropriate. Likewise, ‘Possibly, Zarathustra will speak’ is either a compound of ‘Zarathustra’s speaking is possible’ (factive) or of ‘It is possible that Zarathustra will speak’ (affirmative).

The conjunction ‘that’ can be omitted in many English finite clauses. This has no effect on meaning or translation. We will include ‘that’ in the following examples for clarity.

Topicalisation of ‘that’-clauses

As with infinitives and gerunds, the consecutive case can be topicalised to express perfects and stative verbs. The second sentence is an example of a ‘that’-clause that’s not translated as an accusative object (but with a persuasive).

The contrast between different cleft sentences is much more pronounced when they appear in ‘that’-clauses.

Topicalising a plot case to mark a receptive verb is as problematic as with gerunds.

Still more subtleties

The agent of the dependent clause can also be expressed as an object of the main predicate, similar to the modal verb constructions, albeit with the same disadvantages. Formally, these alternatives are similar to English ‘I see that Jacopo is writing about his trumpet’ (‘Jacopo’ is part of the dependent clause: Who is writing about his trumpet?) vs. ‘I see Jacopo writing about his trumpet’ (he is an object of the main verb: I see whom?).

‘that’-clauses, like gerunds, can appear as attributes (‘the assumption that Jacopo is writing’). These might be confused with relative clauses (‘the poodle that barked loudly’) but aren’t, if you think it over: the difference is that you can say ‘The assumption is that Jacopo is writing’, but not **‘The poodle is that barked loudly’.

Some ‘that’-clauses (let’s call them judgemental) claim reality. Yes, this means inversion.

Direct and indirect speech

With the Lemizh pronouns and ways of expressing time, there is no need to change the reference point in indirect speech, as in English ‘I will visit my uncle’ → ‘You said that you would visit your uncle’. The pronouns will automatically point to the right person.

In some situations it can still be helpful to use pronouns of a higher level.

If the cited sentence is topicalised, its English translation technically changes from a direct object to one with the preposition ‘about’. This difference is rarely important, except to distinguish ‘I say “trumpet-fact”’ (‘qualifying information’) from ‘I talk about the word “trumpet-acc”’.

Another technicality occurs if the predicate of the quoted sentence is a compound: it then turns into a modified object expressing ‘You said that you would do something that was not visiting your uncle’, ‘You said that you would do something that should be visiting your uncle’, or the like. This is another case of mod-raising; if undesirable, the predicate has to be uncompounded.

If several consecutive sentences are part of a citation, it is often enough to include the inquit (wàx. ‘You/he/… says’) in the first sentence; the remaining sentences will still be consistent with Rule Seven (because they are more hypothetical than reality). If necessary, the inquit can be repeated with the pronoun à., or the sentences can just be enclosed in quotes.

Playing around with dependencies and reality: weak linking

When dependent clauses get more complicated, we need to be more careful with the objects. Have a look at the persuasives in the following examples.

In the first example, the vitamins are the reason for Jacopo’s statement. In the second one, they are the reason for her eating and have a lower degree of reality. In the inverted sentence, both the eating and its reason are still part of his statement, but now reality is claimed for the eating.

We can move the vitamins out of Jacopo’s statement into a separate sentence, and refer back to ‘eat’, the accusative object of the first sentence, with a pronoun. We also need a pseudo-desorption here.

This phrasing again claims that her eating is real, because the factive bracket in the second sentence confers reality on it. If this is undesirable, we can re-combine the two sentences by making the pronoun a motivational object (ul, motivational context, agent-centered) or a contextual object (yl, causal context, action-centered) of the first sentence, reducing its degree of reality again. This is called weak linking. Weak linking is also used simply to keep related information in the same sentence without including it in the scope of the predicate – as for reporter’s insertions (editorialising) in indirect speech.

The pronoun used for weak linking often has to refer directly, not via the predicate, because otherwise its objects’ outer cases would refer to the wrong stem.

For the sake of completeness, modified objects should be mentioned. To express objects of the modifier, we uncompound it and use weak linking instead. (Here, the linking pronoun is not the motivational/contextual object.)

Clauses with other conjunctions

A number of subordinating conjunctions need other cases than the accusative, sometimes in combination with temporal and spatial verbs. These include ‘because, as, since’ (caus/psu; ‘as’ in its temporal sense temp; ‘since’ in its temporal sense ing), ‘so that’ (cons), ‘in order that’ (fin), ‘when, while’ (temp/eps), ‘until’ (egr), ‘where’ (loc/ill), ‘after’ (prÌ. front-acc¹. plus temp), ‘before’ (prilkÌ. front-cons-opposition-acc¹. plus temp). To specify that an event occurs ‘while’ another is in progress, we need an ‘inside’ construction plus temp, or just eps if the agent has chosen the progressing action as a background or ‘stage’.

Conjunctional clauses in negated sentences sometimes characterise the negator, so we cannot compound. This is commonly the case with causal clauses.

See the second paragraph about modified objects for ‘She doesn’t eat it, because of the vitamins’, an analogous situation with a causal object.

The conjunction ‘lest’ (fin) has a negative sense and is translated accordingly.

To capture the indefinite sense of ‘whatever, wherever’ etc., we use a partitive bracket with the indefinite pronoun gwà..

The conjunction ‘(al)though’ corresponds to the preposition ‘despite’. ‘as … as’ and ‘than’, as well as ‘if’ and ‘unless’, are discussed in the following two chapters. The conjunction ‘whether’ is treated towards the end of the next unit.

Comparison clauses

Comparison clauses translate like ‘enough’ and ‘too’ (with ‘as … as’ corresponding to ‘enough’ and ‘than’ to ‘too’), the clause’s predicate replacing the modal verb. The first and second of the following examples contain an inversion of nená yhwÌ fÌta. run-fact¹ horse-acc-acc^2a fast-acc-fact².. The third is akin to ‘enough people’.

‘that’-clauses are also used in comparisons. While ‘so … that’ introduces a consecutive clause in English, it can be translated in a simpler way. This example is constructed like ‘The horse runs as fast as spectators assume’.

Conditional clauses

‘if’ and ‘unless’ are conjunctions that introduce finite clauses of the conditional type, ‘unless’ being simply the (nonexistence) negation of ‘if’. Factual conditionals express conditions the truth of which is unverified, whereas counterfactual ones express a condition that is known to be false. The former is translated with a modal verb or a verb of (un)certainty, the latter with the negator. Both types use weak linking of a causative clause. The phrase ‘go mad’ is a pseudo-desorption.

* The causative clause in the counterfactual example is not negated: if I did read the texts (pronoun), the cause would be the discovery of the password (the pronoun’s causative object).

Here the significance of weak linking is undeniable:

• làxt àshy srýby iakopyké xÙlskel wrytplÌki. want-fact¹ read-fact-acc² write-acc-acc³ Jacopo-acc-nom^4a search-fin-caus³ password-acc-dat⁴. (one sentence) means ‘I want to read Jacopo’s texts because of me finding the password’ (Rule Two).
• làxt àshy srýby iakopÌke. là fyà xÙlskel wrytplÌki. want-fact¹ read-fact-acc² write-acc-acc³ Jacopo-acc-nom^4a. do-fact¹ PII_n−1-acc-fact² search-fin-caus² password-acc-dat³. (two sentences, not weakly linked) does not work either because reading the texts is equated with the second main predicate and thus claimed to be real.

Alternative translations

Main and dependent (causative) clauses can be exchanged, the main clause becoming a consecutive. The pseudo-desorption in this example is necessary because ‘search’ is topicalised.

Reducing the ‘if’-clause to an (instrumental or causative) object can sometimes simplify a conditional sentence.

Here is a shortcut for conditional clauses containing a judgement (‘It is good if …’, ‘It would be a pity if …’). It is none other than the judgemental ‘that’-clause from further up this unit, but before inversion.

Conditional constructions that have a reduced degree of reality as a whole don’t need weak linking: ‘Maybe it works if you plug it in = by plugging it in-ins’.

Logically speaking, the above constructions express entailment or implication (I find the password → I read Jacopo’s texts): they do not rule out the possibility of me reading the texts without having found the password. Equivalence (I find the password ↔ I read Jacopo’s texts) can be expressed with an exclusive ‘or’ construction combined with a negation.

Clauses that do not express a causal relationship are also phrased with ‘or’, inclusive or exclusive: ‘If Umberto Eco didn’t write Foucault’s Pendulum, someone else did = Umberto Eco or someone else wrote Foucault’s Pendulum’. Some ‘if’-clauses, especially universal and other certain statements, are better translated as temporal clauses: ‘Computers only work if = when(ever) they get electricity’.

Clauses dependent on topicalised verbs

A dependent clause of a topicalised main predicate is subject to the considerations on objects of topicalised verbs. Temporal clauses in combination with topicalised main predicates (especially causal and temporal) make typical examples. Sometimes we can avoid a pseudo-desorption.

Compare the last example with ‘He had been looking at the pendulum since the museum closed’ above: the difference is that ‘look’ is not a stative verb.

Circumstantial clauses

Circumstantial clauses are participial clauses at the beginning (or end) of a sentence that typically convey causal or temporal meaning. Don’t translate them as participles but as conjunctional clauses, because otherwise the type of relation to the main clause would get lost. They can be placed near the front of the sentence to present information in the same order as we do in English.

A causal circumstantial clause in a negated sentence is an object of the negator, as described above.

For the second example, a translation parallel to the third (‘When he was speaking to the child about elephants, it is not true that the man remembered to buy the artichokes.’) would work, but it would prevent compounding and thus make it unnecessarily verbose.

Exercises

	Translate:
	làxt àshy srýby iakopÌke, xÙlskel wrytplÌki.
	want-fact1 read-fact-acc2 write-acc-acc3 Jacopo-acc-nom4a search-fin-caus2 password-acc-dat3.
	I am sure it is good if Jacopo speaks.
	It cost me more (= I paid more) than I’d hoped.
	Being rather tetchy, the tortoise is shouting at me although I fed it.
	I stopped reading as I heard a noise. (two possibilities with different meanings)
	Jacopo recommends her to eat it because of the vitamins [instead of the taste].
	Maybe the baby’ll eat if you sing to it.
	Why doesn’t the translation of the above sentence mean ‘Maybe the baby eats because of the singing’? How is this sentence translated?

Unit 16