Imralu wrote:Travis B. wrote:I am not sure if I like having every NP other than a pronoun end in a determiner. While it resolves a lot of grammatical problems (combined with making every relative clause after the first one after a noun begin with a word roughly meaning "and"), without which it would be very easy to construct very ambiguous sentences due to which noun relative clauses would belong to within nested relative clauses and whether clauses are relative clauses or are serial verb construnctions in the first place being ambiguous, it results in multiple determiners stranded at the very end of nested relative clauses, such as the instances of ya ya above. However, I do not know how to resolve this issue without said determiners or case endings at the end of NPs while still retaining an SVO-serial verb word order and a N-relative word order while not marking nouns for number or having gender which could serve to disambiguate.
Could you put the determiner before the relative clause?
The thing is that would defeat the whole point of having said determiners, i.e. that determiners let the listener know the level of nesting a relative clause or serial verb is at.
For instance, because the language is SVO, has relative clauses following nouns, and has VO or VS relative clauses and VO serial verb constructions, you can have a series of nouns and verbs taking the following form:
N V N V N V N V N
Because in many cases verb agreement is unmarked (with 3rd sg. subjects and objects), and there is no number or gender on nouns themselves to directly agree with one can come up with multiple alternative structures, where the () marks NPs, [] marks relative clauses, and {} marks serial verb constructions, such as:
N V (N [V N] [V N] [V N])
or:
N V (N [V (N [V (N [V N])])])
or:
N V (N [V N]) {V (N [V N])}
or:
(N [V N]) V (N [V N {V N}])
and so on...
Relative clauses and serial verbs could be distinguished by making an explicit relative clause marker or serial verb marker. I have found it necessary to use a conjunction to mark relative clauses after the first relative clause qualifying a noun. However, this in itself does not solve the nesting level problem, because it does not tell you what level of nesting a relative clause or serial verb construction actually belongs to.
