Participant encoding

As pointed out by Cristofaro (2003: 201), relative clauses have an important peculiarity with respect to participant expression if compared to other types of dependent clauses, namely, they, by definition, obligatorily share a participant with the main clause. Various options for the representation of the shared participant within the relative clause are usually referred to as different relativizing strategies, cf. Comrie & Kuteva (2013a, 2013b). As I have shown in Section 2.3.1, in participial relative clauses the relativized participant can be absent (gap strategy), represented by a resumptive pronoun (pronoun- retention strategy), or undergo no changes whatsoever if the language in question features internally headed relative clauses (non-reduction strategy). The way how the relativized participant is expressed does not, however, have a direct connection to the deranking of the relative clause (although prototypical instances of participial relative clauses are said to employ gap strategy, cf. Lehmann (1984). Thus, in the discussion of participant encoding in participial relative clauses, which will take place in Chapter 6, I will focus on the encoding of the participants other than the relativized one, that is, A participants in case of P relativization, P participants in case of A relativization, S/A participants in case of locative relativization, etc.

An important remark is in order here, regarding the notion of subject in participial relative clauses. The term subject in general has been amply discussed in linguistic literature, and can be understood differently by different authors following different approaches. In this study, I will basically use this term to refer to the A participant of a clause that has undergone relativization if the clause is transitive, e.g. nay-ka ‘I’ in the Korean example of P relativization in (123a), or to the S participant of an intransitive relativized clause, e.g. Peter-ka ‘Peter’ in the example of locative relativization in (123b):

Korean (Koreanic > Korean, South Korea, North Korea; Shin 2003: 27, 33, my slightly modified glosses)

a. [nay-ka sa-l] cha-nun hankwukcey-i-ta

I-NOM buy-REL.FUT car-TOP Korean.made-is-END

‘The car which I am going to buy is Korean-PDGH¶ĸI am going to buy a car)

b. [Peter-ka ilha-nun] siktang

Peter-NOM work-REL.PRS restaurant

‘The restaurant where Peter works.’ (ĸPeter works in a restaurant)

Classifying the subjects of Korean participial relative clauses as such is fairly uncontroversial, since they bear nominative marking and otherwise behave as regular subjects of independent sentences. In other languages, however, some problematic cases can be found. The major type of such problematic cases concerns relativization by means of forms inherently oriented towards P participants, that is, passive participles. As I showed earlier in Section 3.3.3, cross-linguistically these forms commonly demonstrate properties of prototypical passives, including the pragmatic demotion of the A participant. Moreover, we have seen that at least in some languages the patient of the underlying situation behaves syntactically as the subject of the participial relative clause. For instance, in Modern Standard Arabic, it triggers verbal agreement in gender and number on the relative clause predicate, cf. example (61) and the accompanying discussion. In such cases, it is clearly improper to refer to the A participant as the subject of the relativized clause. At the very least, it would be confusing, even if we intend to mean semantic subject as understood, for instance, by Mel’þuk (1988: 167). On the other hand, agents in passive relative clauses ultimately do correspond to the A participants of the situation, and it makes sense to consider their encoding together with underlying A participants in other types of relative constructions. Due to the outlined issues, in what follows I will discuss all the instances of A/S participant expression in participial relative clauses together, refraining, however, from using the term subject in unclear cases. For A participants in relative clauses introduced by passive participles, I will use the term agent instead.

As it is the case with many other observations on mixed categories, most of the formulated generalizations on non-standard participant encoding concern different types of nominalizations rather than participles or converbs. Comrie (1976) noted that the subject is more likely to receive possessive marking than other verbal arguments. As Malchukov (2004: 10) puts it, both A/S and P participants may retain sentential encoding or both may be genitivized, but if only one argument is genitivized, it will be A/S while P may retain its sentential marking. Koptjevskaja-Tamm (1993) introduced a more elaborate typology of action nominalizations defining several cross-lingustic patterns in argument marking. Argument encoding in participial relative clauses, however, has not been studied in its own right. According to Cristofaro’s (2003: 207–208) observations, the coding of arguments as possessors is quite rare in relative clauses, and is not subject to any constraints other than that the argument coded as a possessor should not be the relativized one. As I will, however, show in Chapter 6, if one only takes into consideration the languages featuring otherwise deranked relative clauses, this type of participant encoding is not at all uncommon. Moreover, it is possible to establish certain tendencies as to which participants are more likely to be encoded as possessors, see Section 6.5.

In principle, “the conversion of verbal into nominal government” as mentioned by Lehmann (1988), can affect not only argument encoding, but also the choice of modifiers. Comrie & Thompson (2007: 344), for instance, illustrate this by an example from English. In the independent sentence The enemy destroyed the city rapidly the finite verb is modified by the adverb rapidly. The corresponding nominalized construction the enemy’s

rapid destruction of the city, on the other hand, features the adjective rapid, which attributively modifies the derived verbal noun. In my sample, however, I have not observed any changes in the expression of modifiers in participial relative clauses29_.

Therefore, Chapter 6 will only be concerned with the peculiarities of participant expression.

4.4. Summary and conclusions

In this chapter, I started with providing an overview of the most representative scalar approaches to desententialization/nominalization. The sections in the second part of this chapter further introduced various ways of desententializing the predicate that are relevant for participial relative clauses. It should be emphasized that these criteria should not be considered as the markers that signal desententialization in each particular instance of participial relativization. They rather represent various ways in which participial relative clauses can differ from independent clauses within a language.

As I have shown in this chapter, all of the approaches recognize two main domains in which the difference between dependent and independent forms may lie, the verb form itself and the encoding of various clausal participants. I will further discuss these two domains based on the actual language data collected for this study in two separate chapters following this one. Chapter 5 will focus on the deviations related to the participle as a verb form, while Chapted 6 is concerned with the argument encoding in participial relative clauses.

29_{This can be regarded as a reflection of the fact that participles have less in common with underived nouns} than various types of nominalizations.

5. Morphological desententialization of participial relative