Word order and morphology

Externally headed relative clauses

In English, as all of the preceding examples illustrate, the modifying clause always follows the head noun. This is probably the most common ordering of these elements across languages, but it is certainly not the only possibility. A large number of languages have the opposite order, with the modifying clause preceding the head noun. Both of these possibilities are examples of EXTERNALLY HEADED relative clauses, i.e. those in which the head noun occurs outside the modifying clause, whether before or after. The other possibility, namely an INTERNALLY HEADED relative clause, is quite rare.

If we examine externally headed relative constructions in many different languages, we will discover a partial correlation between the position of the modifying clause (before or after the head noun) and other word order facts in the language. Verb-initial languages (those in which the verb occurs first in a basic declarative sentence, whether VSO or VOS) almost always have POSTNOMINAL (or POST-POSED) relative clauses, with the modifying clause following the head noun. A large number of verb-final (SOV) languages have PRENOMINAL (or PRE-POSED) relative clauses, with the modifying clause preceding the head noun. A Turkish example showing this structure is given in (42) (the abbreviation NMLZ stands for NOMINALIZER).¹⁰ But other verb-final languages have postnominal relative clauses instead.

Most SVO languages (including English) use postnominal relative clauses. Some of these languages also have a prenominal relative construction, but these are typically more restricted in their distribution. We can summarize these observations by saying that, across languages, post-nominal relatives are more common than prenominal, and that prenominal relatives are the preferred option only in SOV languages.

Aside from the prenominal order, there is another important difference between the Turkish example in (42) and the English examples in (35–41). In English relative clauses, the modifying clause contains a normal finite verb form, fully inflected for tense and agreement. In Turkish, however, the verb inside the modifying clause must be NOMINALIZED; that is, it is changed into a form which belongs to the category N.¹² Because of this change, the subject of the modifying clause is marked for genitive case, rather than the expected nominative. This kind of prenominal relative clause, with a nominalized verb form and a genitive subject, is found in a number of other SOV languages as well.

Another common pattern is for the verb inside the modifying clause to appear as a PARTICIPLE. German has two kinds of relative clauses: a prenominal relative containing a participial form of the verb (43a); and a postnominal relative containing a normal finite verb form (43b). Note that English also allows participial relatives, as illustrated in the translation of (43a).

¹⁰. (42–43) and (45) are from Keenan (1985), as are many of the typological generalizations.

¹¹. The possessor agreement marker–i on the nominalized verb agrees with the person and number of the genitive subject, in the same way that a possessed noun agrees with its genitive possessor in a Turkish noun phrase.

¹². We will discuss morphological processes of this type in more detail in Derivational morphology.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

جامعة أم البنين (عليها السلام) الإلكترونية تعلن فتح باب التسجيل للدراسات التبليغية والقرآنية

مستشفى الكفيل يعتمد أحدث التقنيات العالمية في عمليات زراعة القوقعة

مركز السيد جعفر الحلي يستقبل مدير صحة كربلاء للاطّلاع على خدماته المقدّمة للزائرين

قسم الشؤون الفكريَّة يقدِّم ندوة ثقافية لوفد شبابي من الموصل

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

حالة صحية شائعة قد تُخفي "إنذارا مبكرا" للإصابة بالسرطان !

"أوميغا 3" صديق القلب.. هل يربك سكر الدم؟

بدائل لليمون.. 8 إضافات للماء تعزز فوائده الصحية

دراسة: محاولة متعمدة لنشر الإنفلونزا تنتهي بـ"مفاجأة"

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

سلامة الأطفال: سبع قواعد ذهبية للركوب الآمن بالسيارة

توقع خطير لماسك: الروبوتات ستتفوق على البشر من حيث العدد

دراسة تكشف عاملا غير متوقع يرتبط بزيادة خطر الإصابة بالتوحد

"ميتا" توقف وصول المراهقين إلى شخصيات الذكاء الاصطناعي ؟

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Morphological aspect

Constituent structure

A typology of word structure

Analyzing position classes

Representing word structure

Different kinds of morphemes

Morphemes Definition of “morpheme”

Analyzing word structure

Mirror in nominal morphology

Appendix 2: Hapax legomena from the Cobuild corpus

Appendix 1: 20th century neologisms from the OED

Morphological Productivity Structural Constraints in English Derivation Conclusion