Friday, December 12, 2014

Detail #130: Come up with distinct relativization strategies

The accessibility hierarchy for relativization is a friend when it comes to this. It's quite useful to let languages loan strategies from languages that accept a wider part of the accessibility hierarchy – retain the old strategy for whatever was permitted earlier, use a new strategy for whatever got accessible due to the new influences.

Maybe your language thoroughly uses relative pronouns, but its original relative pronouns where a series distinct from all other pronouns. Then it comes in contact with a language whose relative pronouns are identical to its interrogative pronouns (or whichever other pronouns you like - in Finnish, they're more similar to the "each"-pronouns/determiners, the main relativizing pronoun in Swedish afaict probably shares roots with 'somliga', a cognate to English 'some' - so interrogative pronouns are not the only pronouns that can be the source of relativizing pronouns), and you get different sources for different case forms of the relativizing pronoun!

However, there's of course other possibilities too. The difference may extend even to the strategy that is used - maybe participles for a few, etc. Have a look at wals.info for more strategies.

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