Detail #137, pt2

An easy way of implementing these things would be for the relativized-genitive and relativized-comparative-object participles to combine with the embedded role:

John, whose dog terrorizes the mailman

dog mailman terrorize.active_participle.genitive_participle John

For this kind of thing, though, it might seem more natural to construct it something like:

with the mailman-terrorizing dog, John

his mailman-terrorizing dog, John

Which isn't quite a participle that affects John, but rather makes a kind of apposited possessee affected by a regular participle. Thus, we will temporarily leave the genitive-participle for now and return to it later with some slightly odd things to do with it.


And for the comparative object, we get some really nice problems restating this in any nice way. One probably needs a few specific "than"'s - quantitative, qualitative, etc

Phoebe, who no one has solved more challenging calculus problems than

solve-active-participle/quantitative-than Phoebe

Tanya, whom they respect more than anyone else

no-one else respect_passive-participle/qualitative-than Tanya

One option could of course be to compare the participle per se, but this kind of turns the argument structure around: the respecteder Eric ('the more respected Eric' - not 'the Eric who X is more respected than'). Of course, the object of comparison may also be oblique, fucking stuff up even more properly.
However, these are  somewhat ugly solutions, and both can lead to the participle carrying huge loads of arguments - even subjects.

So, in the third installment, we'll try and find some fun things to do with these that partially preserve the idea of a than-participle and a 's-participle without fully enabling *all* the syntactic freedom of relative clauses in English but enabling some fun unexpected new usages.