Unit 16. Dependent clauses: introduced with pronouns or adverbs

Ylva-li and I have a special language, which no one understands but the two of us.

Pronouns and adverbs vs. conjunctions

Now we move on to finite clauses introduced with a pronoun (e.g. ‘who, which, that’) or an adverb (e.g. ‘where, why’). To get the naming issue right out of the way: from the Lemizh point of view, the difference between subordinating pronouns and adverbs is just a matter of plot case vs. causal/temporal/spatial case. Most of these clauses also go by the name of relative clauses, but we will also treat indirect questions in this unit. Then we will conclude with direct questions, the imperative, and exclamations.

Some of the English (and other Indo-European) pronouns and adverbs introducing dependent clauses look like subordinating conjunctions but are used quite differently. Compare:

As you see, clauses introduced with pronouns and adverbs usually occur in the role of attributes (or adverbs, as we will see shortly). This should remind you of the attributive and adverbial adjectives and participles in unit 5. However, we will also meet a group of counterexamples, the headless relative clauses.

Relative clauses

Attributive and adverbial clauses

Just as conjunctional clauses are the finite counterparts of infinitive and gerund clauses – being expanded objects –, we are now dealing with the finite counterparts of participial clauses – so we use brackets and coordinations for translation. Different relative pronouns (English, not Lemizh ones) and adverbs correspond to different inner cases: pronouns to plot cases and adverbs to others. Recall that the look-alike conjunctions correspond to different outer cases.

Not surprisingly, adverbial clauses (clauses in the role of adverbs; not necessarily introduced with adverbs) are usually factive or consecutive brackets. Again, the pronoun or adverb is reflected by the inner case.

In this light, we can translate the inverted gerund ‘I didn’t see Amélie watching TV [but she did]’ into English as the more accurate but less elegant ‘Amélie was watching TV, which I didn’t see’.

The English formal ambiguity between conjunctions and adverbs sometimes translates into an ambiguity between outer and inner case in Lemizh.

Usually we want to talk about the place of sitting, so the first phrasing is to be preferred.

Restrictive relative clauses

If an attributive relative clause is not separated from the main clause by commas in English, it is considered restrictive. Restrictive clauses can also be introduced with the pronoun ‘that’ (as well as ‘which’): compare ‘The poodles that/which were born at midnight are yelping’ (restrictive: there are other poodles, but I’m referring to the ones born at midnight) with ‘The poodles, which were born at midnight, are yelping’ (non-restrictive: all of them were born at midnight; and this fact is additional information about them). A restrictive clause sometimes has to be translated with a partitive bracket, as we have seen – becoming the bracket’s predicate.

Non-restrictive relative clauses

A non-restrictive relative clause in English is one with commas. It can normally be translated as a cumulative bracket. To explicitly state that the contained information is additional and does not serve to identify the referent (here, the instance of ‘poodle’), it has to be moved into a separate sentence, which can then be weakly linked.

The bracket is appropriate whenever the poodle can be clearly identified without the relative clause, so that it obviously just provides additional information. The other translations make explicit that the midnight-born-ness is not needed to pin down the instance of ‘poodle’. — The pragmatics pages contain some more information on the differences between these translations.

Some English non-restrictive clauses serve as explanations or reasons for the main clause and so are called explanatory relative clauses. They are translated as conjunctional clauses, typically in causal cases, exactly like the circumstantial clauses, as translating them as relative clauses would lose the cause–consequence relation in Lemizh.

Weak bracket

Relative clauses can cause translation problems if their predicate differs from the underlying participle; this is notably the case with uncompounded modal verbs. The solution is similar to weak linking, only it is a bracket with an inner contextual or motivational case. The clause’s head has to be referenced with a pronoun in the dependent clause.

Often it is better to rephrase by an inversion or by leaving out the additional object per Rule Six.

Headless relative clauses

On the risk of my readers getting funny ideas, I will call them ‘headless relatives’ for short. These are pronominal relative clauses that aren’t attributive because they have lost their referent (head, or predicate in Lemizh terminology) because it isn’t important. Thus, instead of saying ‘He found the thing that I wanted’ (attributive relative clause), we can say ‘He found what I wanted’ (headless relative). To do this in Lemizh, we omit the bracket’s unnecessary predicate along with the two case endings forming the bracket (one inner and one outer), pushing up its object by one level. This method works whenever a bracket’s predicate is unnecessary, even if we cannot form a corresponding English headless relative.

In the second example we cannot get rid of the placeholder ‘the one who’ in English, wherefore we informally call this a ‘nearly headless relative’. Actually, we have been using those from the beginning – recall ‘the one who tells something’. This sentence is not the same as ‘I know who stole the poodle’: this is an indirect question, which we will treat later in this unit.

The pronouns and adverbs ‘whoever, whenever’ etc. (not to be confused with the homonymous conjunctions) also introduce headless relatives. To capture the indefinite sense we use an indefinite pronoun and a partitive bracket again.

Relative clauses and topicalisation

Since headless relatives aren’t (necessarily) brackets, the only difference to infinitive, gerund and conjunctional clauses seems to be the inner case, which is not a factive or affirmative. But then, those clauses can be topicalised. So what is the difference? Nothing much, actually.

Questions, imperative and exclamations

Rule Seven of sentence grammar implies that all sentences are actually declarative sentences (statements); but all languages have sentences in other moods as well. ‘Did you feed the poodle?’ and ‘Feed the poodle!’ do not claim reality of the feeding. ‘When did you feed the poodle?’ claims reality of the feeding only pragmatically, like ‘I see white mice’ suggests the existence of the mice. Consequently, we have to paraphrase non-declarative sentences by moving the verb down to level 2 and introducing a new main predicate. For direct questions, this means that they become indirect questions with the main predicate pà. ‘ask’.

But how do we translate indirect questions?

‘What about’-questions

The simplest type of question consists of ‘ask’ as the main predicate plus some accusative object. In direct questions, ‘ask’ can easily be compounded since its nominative object is clear – it is myself. (See the modal verbs with undefined nominative.) The compound also gives us the opportunity to topicalise the new main predicate: observe the consecutive, i.e. perfect, in the third example.

The translations of the accusative objects with inner non-factives as ‘ask about’ reflect what we have said about the preposition ‘about’.

The answer is constructed by referring to the question’s predicate with a pronoun. The pronoun doesn’t convey any useful information, so we get rid of it per Rule Six.

We can ask for any object in a sentence by inserting pÌ. ‘the asked-for thing’ and then making ‘ask’ the main predicate by inversion. This also works for factive objects, and even for words of deeper levels. Also note that ‘how’ has different functions in the following questions, and is translated differently.

Wh-questions

Wh-questions are introduced with interrogative pronouns or adverbs (which, in English, look like the relative ones). As with relative clauses, different pronouns and adverbs correspond to different inner cases of the object: ‘Who has eaten the sweets?’ has the dative, ‘Why did you eat the sweets?’ the persuasive, ‘How (by which means) did you eat the sweets?’ the instrumental (in contrast to the factive question ‘How (in which way) did you eat the sweets?’ and the consecutive ‘How tall is Lorenza (to what extent)?’ above).

This type of question asks for the identity of an object: in ‘Who has eaten the sweets?’, the content of asking (the thing asked about) is the identity of the eater, as opposed to ‘What about the one who ate the sweets?’, where the person asked about is the eater herself. Luckily, the word ‘identity’ is rather short in Lemizh: Ìd., the inner accusative of the verb àd. ‘give someone/something an identity’. ‘the identity of the eater’ has the eater as the dative object, as she is the one who is given an identity. The pronoun in the answer typically forms a bracket.

Often it is sufficient to ask for a person or thing (‘What about the one who has eaten the sweets? — [It’s] my sister’) as opposed to the identity, so that we can omit -yd- -identity-acc-.

The interrogative pronoun ‘what’ can be translated with a bracket, ‘which’ with a partitive one.

Ìd. identity-acc¹. is also used in indirect questions with main predicates other than ‘ask’, where it becomes important.

Alternative questions (‘or’-questions)

We have already treated the inclusive and exclusive ‘or’, so alternative questions are not a problem.

Polar questions (‘yes/no’-questions)

Polar questions don’t ask for an object but for the predicate of the queried verb: ‘Are we going?’ — nà jàxy. not-fact¹ move-fact-acc². ‘No, we aren’t going’. We cannot use an inversion to arrive at a construction parallel to the ones above, as the answer ‘No’ would then violate inversion ban. Instead, we use the general verb là. as a placeholder for the predicate.

Parallel to the answer ‘No’ we can form others such as ‘Well, I want to’.

Note that compounding is compulsory for direct polar questions; otherwise the answer ‘yes’ becomes impossible. By the way, Ì. doesn’t just repeat the queried action as is the case in some other languages lacking a word for ‘yes’; it promotes its degree of reality from second to first level.

Topicalisation of the verb ‘move’ allows for the more specific queries ‘Are we going to the valley?’ and ‘Are we going to the valley?’.

Similar to the difference between nearly headless relatives and indirect wh-questions, we have to distinguish between gerund clauses and indirect polar questions.

Rhetorical questions

Rhetorical questions can be phrased like all other questions, which however can come across as irony. (See the chapter on propositional attitudes on the pragmatics pages.) To avoid that, we can translate them as compounds with the verbs xràtx. ‘fear’ or dwàtx. ‘doubt’.

Imperative

Requests and commands can be phrased directly with the verbs of communication pràk. ‘request’ and dàxt. ‘command, must’, but also with various modal verbs and ‘ask’, optionally compounded with weighting numerals to express different degrees of politeness.

The modal verb làxt. ‘want’ can also express advice such as directions for finding the way: ‘Turn left!’ translates as ‘[You] want to turn left’.

Exclamations

Verbs such as fràx. ‘astonish’ translate formal exclamations; but they are usually left out when speaking spontaneouosly.

Tag questions

English tag questions (‘isn’t it?’, ‘do you?’) have a wide variety of uses. They can be actual questions (‘This is your poodle, isn’t it?’), rhetorical questions expressing a request or command (‘You’d better stop now, hadn’t you?’, ‘Do listen, will you?’); they can express politeness, emphasis, or irony; confidence or its lack, etc. A thorough discussion would probably require its own unit, so please use your imagination, possibly in combination with modal verbs, verbs of certainty, and weighting numerals.

Exercises

	Translate:
	We went to the valley where the flowers sing. (with partitive, two possibilities)
	the child that got a bottle vs. the child that took a bottle
	The child, which the tortoise assumes got the bottle, is beautiful. (Translate with and without a weak bracket.)
	I’ve seen a beaver, as (= which is a fact that) I told you. (Include all the pronouns.)
	He found whichever poodle I wanted.
	Why have you eaten the sweets? — Because they tasted nice. (Include the pronoun in the answer.)
	Will you eat the sweets? — If I may.
	xèsk oRwxÌfy. (three possibilities)
	Why is it always possible to remove a bracket’s predicate from a sentence without breaking any dependencies?

Summing up