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Notes on relative and correlative constructions in Gǝʿǝz

Paper · 2013 · Olga Kapeliuk

Summary

Kapeliuk examines why relative clauses are so frequent and so varied in Gǝʿǝz, to a degree unmatched by the other classical Semitic languages. She argues that they compensate for gaps in the morphology. Gǝʿǝz has few ways to form adjectives and lacks productive active participles, so a relative pronoun plus a verb often does that work. The study uses examples mostly from the Bible translations (Gospels, Genesis, Daniel, Leviticus and others), compared with the Greek where relevant. It builds on Dillmann's grammar, renamed here in more formal terms.

The central distinction is between attributive relatives, which have an explicit head noun, and "correlative" clauses, where no head noun appears and the pronoun stands in for it. In attributive clauses, pronoun agreement is loose, which suggests the pronoun is only a subordination marker. In correlative clauses, the singular/plural choice is strict, because the pronoun is a real nominal constituent.

The paper also separates:

  • identifying nominal relatives, which take a copulative pronoun;
  • the look-alike possessive nota genetivi construction.

It links several of these traits to the Agaw (Cushitic) substrate. Note that the extracted PDF gives the volume as Aethiopica 6 (2003), pp. 177–191.

Key points

  • Gǝʿǝz relative pronouns form one paradigm for both relative and correlative use: za- (masc. sg.), ʾǝnta (fem. sg.), ʾǝlla (plural). Classical Arabic, by contrast, keeps separate correlative pronouns (man, mā), and English and French need a prop word such as "the one who".
  • In Matthew 10:37–42, the Gǝʿǝz version has eleven relative-pronoun constructions in six verses, outnumbering the Greek participles they render. Unlike those participles, these constructions can be negated.
  • Signs of drift toward an invariable relative particle are already visible: za- sometimes heads plural or feminine nouns. Conversely, collective nouns can take plural ʾǝlla.
  • Two relative adverbs work in both clause types: ʾaba "where" and ʾama "when". Their use is optional.
  • Other related phenomena covered:
    • cleft sentences;
    • za- used as a "that"-complementizer;
    • za- combined with a preposition to form a subordinating conjunction;
    • lexicalized relatives acting as adjectives (za-la-ʿālam "eternal"), which can even express comparison.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Agreement strictness can diagnose structural status: loose agreement points to a mere linking marker, strict agreement to a true nominal argument.
  • I2. Missing-head ("correlative") clauses are statistically central rather than marginal, and they can serve as subjects, objects, or even heads of further relatives.
  • I3. Negation serves as a test for predicate status: an adjective after a relative pronoun is shown to be predicative because it can be negated.
  • I4. Look-alike constructions are separated by meaning type: the genitive marker expresses possession or appurtenance, while a relative clause with a noun predicate expresses identity. An overt copulative pronoun disambiguates the two.
  • I5. A relative pronoun attached to a whole possessive phrase scopes over the full complex rather than only the nearest noun ("David's righteousness which is trustworthy").

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): When converting or parsing headless relatives, the parser could treat a strictly agreeing pronoun as the nominal head and attach it as an argument, rather than as a mark/acl dependent.
  • I2 (frames): Free relatives like "whoever loves" should yield a frame participant that is a description, not a missing slot, so that role assignment still works.
  • I3 (learn): Inserting negation could be a cheap probe in silver-data checks, to verify whether a parser labels an adjective as a clausal predicate or as a plain modifier.
  • I4 (world): When building entity relations, "X of Y" (possession) and "X who is Y" (identity, i.e. coreference) should become different graph edges, cued by explicit copular material.
  • I5 (tree): Attachment heuristics for relative clauses after possessives should consider the whole possessive phrase as a candidate head, not only the closest noun.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 works

Cite

Cite as Olga Kapeliuk. 2013. Notes on relative and correlative constructions in Gǝʿǝz. Aethiopica 6.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15460/aethiopica.6.1.376

@inproceedings{kapeliuk2013notes,
  title = {{Notes on relative and correlative constructions in Gǝʿǝz}},
  author = {Olga Kapeliuk},
  booktitle = {Aethiopica 6},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.15460/aethiopica.6.1.376},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.6.1.376}
}

References

24 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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