Re: German participles


Ray wrote:
mb wrote:
The appeal to "native speakers" is totally irrelevant after the
grammaticality of the sentence has been acknowledged.

To appeal to native speakers who have no interest in, or knowledge of,
the analytical aspects of their language would be irrelevant, but to
appeal to those who have some (traditional) knowledge about, and
interest in, the grammar of their language might not be irrelevant.

Makes sense.

The problems I've noted are not the result of my supposedly attempting
to analyze German grammar in the straitjacket of English grammar; such
problems are those that any DAF student would encounter because most,
if not all, German grammar books fail to deal with the construction in
question, as phogl has also noted and offer the generalization which
you think is based on English facts.

"8 Personen, [deren] Gesichter versteckt [sind], gehen zum Nr. 10"

You're offering another version of the ellipsis-oriented analysis,
which is untenable on the grounds that the first sentence I originally
asked about has a definite article preceding "Gesichter". But that
article is incompatible with "deren", I guess.
If the participial construction in that sentence is an elliptical form
of "deren...", this means that "8 Personen, deren die
Gisichter...versteckt sind" should be grammatical, contrary to fact.

The simplification of the example intended to mark the fact that the
definite article there is optional. You'd be right if it weren't.

Also, I am also wondering whether the following word-for-word
translation into German would be possible under your version of
ellipsis analysis, which predicts that it should be acceptable:

i. The boy, [whose] dog [was] killed, looked very sad.

No such prediction offered. This isn't algebra with a "for every value
of x"; the various limitations vary for the different languages that
accept this kind of incisa (and I doubt that they have been explicited
in every case). The objection would apply equally to a prediction made
for a hypothetical non-elliptic construction.
....
Or take a non-IE language that doesn't use clause relativisers, where
the exact same thing can be said word-by-word, but with ellipsis of the
attributive case:
"8 ki$i, yüzler[i] gizli, 10 numaraya gidiyor".

First of all, Is that Turkish?
Yes, and reproduces the same sample word for ford except for the
attributive.

Secondly, does German allow a noun phrase like "Acht die Gesichter
hinter Tuechern und Wollmuetzen versteckte Personen"? I guess not. Do
the above languages you've mentioned allow that sort of attributive use
of past participles? If so, that means they are unlike German and
should be treated separately from German.

None of the others in the list allow the phrase you wrote (and German
would be the only one to allow, not that one, but something approaching
it). And of course they are very unlike German, except for the use of a
similarly constructed let's-not-call-it-relative.

.

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