Re: German participles


mb wrote:
Ray wrote:


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.



How about the "dog" example? It seems to me that the definite article
is not optional there. That would definitely serve as a counterexample
to the relative-clause analysis.
Consider it again:

i. *Der Junge, Hund getoetet, sah traurig aus.
*The boy, [whose] dog [was] killed, looked sad.

A good analysis should work like an algebra, if there is no other
consideration.
It seems that cases like (i), which needs a definite article, should be
captured in a grammatical analysis whereas cases
like"Gesichter...versteckt", with no definite article, should be
considered as belonging to a small, limited set of nouns like "face",
"hand", etc and requiring a special treatment.









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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