Detail #137, pt 1: Participles and the relativization accessibility hierarchy

Let us consider the two participles of English - the present and past participles. These clearly correspond more closely to voice distinctions than tense distinctions, really. They also somewhat correlate with relativization in obvious ways.

The accessibility hierarchy of relativization might be a source of inspiration, so let's have a quick look at that!

Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparative [wikipedia]

Some of these are pretty obvious as far as being remapped from relative pronouns to participles - notice that this is not a statement about what is possible in English, but about more cross-linguistically possible things, the use of English constructions is a meta-linguistic device in this case.

subject: x, who|which verbs → verbing x

object: x, who|which [is verbed]/[someone verbs] → verbed x

indirect object: x, to whom|which is verbed → verbed x (does not work in all varieties of English, and might not work with all verbs that permit it in those varieties that have it)

oblique: x, [prep] who|which someone verbs → prep-verbed x

At the next point, however, the pattern seems to break down. In part this is because the genitive does not directly relate to the verb in any reasonably sense - the possessee may well be any type of constituent in the relative clause, compare:

John, by whose authority this would never have happened.

Erin, whose dog was a crazed, murderous wolf-like menace.

Jacob, whose children the Egyptians enslaved.

There, we have the possessee in oblique, subject and object positions. I suspect the same hierarchy actually might apply to these as well - as in, a language that permits all the way up to relativizing genitives might have restrictions on what types of role the possessee may have, and the restriction follows the same implicational hierarchy as the usual hierarchy, with the exception that the last item might be further down.

And that brings us to that last item. Objects of comparison. These are just as un-bound to any particular syntactic function as are genitives:

any house in which more people live than in this house has to be crowded

John, whose house this house is bigger than

apples, which pears are sweeter than, ...

beef, which people eat more often than veal

So, genitive- and comparative-relativizing participles seem somewhat odd. In the next post, I will present some ideas as for what could be done with them.