Глабуіи структура

Apposition and description

Relative clauses

A verb phrase that appears as the predicate of a sentence with a given noun or noun phrase can appear as a modifier of the same noun or noun phrase by being transformed into a relative clause. In English, a relative clause is introduced by a relative pronoun (such as ‘who,’ ‘that,’ ‘which,’ ‘whose,’ or ‘where’), such as in the sentence ’The man whom I saw in the store is my neighbor.’ Since all modifiers must appear before the noun they modify in Iridian, the relative clause must, in contrast to English, appear before the noun it modifies. Moreover, Iridian does not employ relative pronouns; instead the verb phrase is moved almost as-is to the start of the sentence, with the only changes being that of marking the verb in the conjunctive form, as with all non-final verbs in Iridian and the use of the suffix -нь on the verb to mark the relative clause. Since the relative clause and the noun it modifies must both occupy the same role as subject of the relative clause had it been unbound, the voice of the verb must therefore be preserved when the clause is relativized. If the original verb phrase takes a clitic pronoun, the phrase is relativized by moving the whole phrase before the noun being modified, without the addition of the relative clause marker -нь.

If the verb phrase has an agentive argument, the agentive argument becomes marked in the genitive case when the verb phrase is relativized.

An exception to the above rules is where the noun being modified refers to a place or time. In such cases, the voice agreement becomes optional.

Clause-linking strategies

To communicate more complex ideas, it may sometimes be necessary to link two or more sentences together in a single sentence or in a sequence of sentences. In English this is commonly done by using conjunctions such as ‘and,’ ‘but,’ ‘or,’ etc. or relative pronouns like ‘that’ or ‘which.’ The choice of which connector to use depends on the type of relationship between the two clauses. We will consider three broad types of clause linking strategies:

Temporal succession

The conjunctive ending -ни ‘and then’ is used to link two sequential clauses; the secondary clause, which occurs first, indicates the first occuring event while the main clause indicates the second event.

Complementation

There are two main types of complement clauses in Iridian: quotative clauses with бы or тебы and subordinate clauses with ну. Both require its verb argument to be in the conjunctive form. Quotative clauses are used primarily to mark indirect speech, although they can also take non-speech act arguments and express indirectness in general. Subordinate clauses, on the other hand, are used to express a variety of different relations, including causal, concessive, conditional, and purpose clauses, among others.

Quotative constructions

Superficially, the Iridian quotative is used to mark evidentiality, a gram- matical category concerned with the explicit encoding of the source of information or knowledge (i.e., evidence) which the speaker claims to have made use of for producing the primary proposition of the utterance (Diewald and Smirnova 2010: 1-2). Iridian is unique among languages of Central Eu- rope (and of Europe in general) in possessing a grammaticalized evidentiality system. Even non-Indo European languages in the region such as Hungarian (cf. author) or Basque (cf. Alcázar 2010) do not possess an overt evidential, although of course in these two languages, and in any language for that mat- ter, a speaker’s source of information may be expressed through syntactic or other methods .

The Iridian evidentiality system more or less falls under Aikhenvald’s (2004) A3 category, where the distinction is between the marked quotative form for reported speech/hearsay and the unmarked ‘everything else’ cate- gory which is evidentiality-neutral. That is, the unmarked form does not tell us anything about the source of the information, while the marked form tells us that the information is reported speech. In practice, however, the quotative is used in an array of other constructions that is not necessarily predicated on evidentiality, but might be lexically or semantically motivated as well, in the same way perhaps that the subjunctive in Romance languages have become grammaticalized into a subordination marker (cf. Poplack et al. 2018).

The principal use of the quotative is to explicitly mark reported speech. The reported clause is separated from the rest of the sentence by the particle бы or тебы, with the main verb of the reported clause in the conjunctive form. The latter is used where the quoted clause is a question while the former is used in all other cases. As discussed in the section on event nominals, the speech verb is usually nominalized, with the speaker marked in the gentivie case. The verb in direct quotations is not marked in the conjunctive form, nor does the quoted clause require the particle бы.

Alternatively, the speech tag may introduce the quoted clause if it is a direct quotation. The speech tag is separated from the quoted clause by a colon. Otherwise, as in any other sentences with a complement clause, the main verb (or its nominalized form, as the case may be) must appear at the end of the sentence. This inversion is specially common when the speaker is ommitted from the speech tag.

The nominalized speech verb is usually understood to refer to a speech act that has happened in the past. Nevertheless, if used with the appropriate temporal adverbs, the tag may be interpreted as referring to a habitual or recurrent speech act.

Nevertheless, the aspect may be explicitly marked in the speech tag if the speaker wishes to emphasize the aspect of the speech act. The verb in the speech tag can only be marked in the patientive voice for direct quotations, while there is no restriction for indirect quotations.

The reportative particle камо may be used with both indirect and direct quotations to indicate the speaker’s attitude towards the quoted information.

The most common speech verb is озѣка ‘to say.’ Other speech verbs include прехоўста ‘to ask,’ квушта ‘to hear,’ беда ‘to see,’ вада ‘to think,’ сехова ‘to recount/tell,’ мала ‘to know,’ охлѣта ‘to remember,’ милта ‘to forget,’ цебера ‘to believe,’ грума ‘to shout,’ дибыла ‘to whisper,’ and адуня ‘to cry,’ among others. Note that although they are called verbs ‘of speaking’ they do not necessarily introduce speech as much as function as grammaticalized tags marking the quotative, which is more properly analyzed to mark not just speech but inferentiality and evidentiality as well.

Bare quotatives

As has been briefly mentioned in § 7.6.2, quotative constructions may also appear without an overt main clause. We call this construction a bare quotative after the terminology in Tomioka and Kim (2019). In most cases, bare quotatives are not used to mark a speech act, but rather to indicate the speaker’s judgment or evaluation of a proposition. This usage is similar to the use of a conjunctive ending -ма to ‘soften’ a statement (see § 7.4.2) and show hesitation or uncertainty. When a bare quotative is used in this way, it serves to show the speaker’s emotional or cognitive distance from the information being presented. This can be done for various reasons, such as to avoid being held accountable for the information if the speaker is unsure of its accuracy, to be polite by not being too direct with the listener, or to express irony or sarcasm. This non-reportative use can be extended even to utterances which directly come from the speaker but from which the speaker wishes to establish distance due to the reasons stated above.