Re: German participles


mb wrote:
Ray wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Both are acceptable, if I interpret one of my grammar guides correctly.

You are hung up on labels (hasn't this been pointed out to you before?),

How come?
Labels are labels. I wouldn't have used them that way if they were not
used that way.

and you are using some sort of obsolete quasi-Chomskyan syntactic
approach.

I don't see anything particularly Chomskyan with the approach I've
taken here.
Anyway, if there is any problem with the approach, please give specific
reasons and the absurd consequences it could lead to.

Since you (I believe you're a Chinese-speaker?) refuse to accept what
the native speakers of German told you, what's the point of discussing
it?

I don't refuse to accept what every one of them told me. It's just that
even native speakers don't see things in the same way. Joachim Pense
sees two possibilities with the sentence I asked about originally,
whereas others see only one. What could you do?

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.





Also, what you are trying to do is to stick a highly arbitrary label,
one among the many invented to describe some English constructions, on
a clause that is grammatical in a number of different languages.

You can have a word-by-word translation of this same sentence that is
grammatical in many different IE languages. In those languages, the
possible labels are also many and, just like the ones you are playing
with, highly variable. Only they generally have nothing to do with the
way you want to categorize them in English. In every one of these
languages, the different ways of describing a certain clause will also
depend on the different grammatical categories used within the
language. In most languages, a functional description would be that of
an elliptic relative or incisa or whatever you want to call it (i.e. an
adverbial, or other qualificative, aside), where the ellipsis could be
in the relative/attributive marking, the predicate, or both.



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.




Have a look (simplified, and "Gestalt" replaced by "person" to avoid
other complications; ellipseis marked):

"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.

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.








"8 personnes, [dont] le visage [est] caché, vont au numéro 10"
"8 persone, [le cui] facce [sono] nascoste, vanno al numero 10"
"8 átoma, [tôn opoíôn ta] prósôpa [eínai] krymména, pêgénoun
ston arithmó 10"

The list is much longer, of course (Sp/Po/Slavonic etc). Speakers of
each of the different languages that accept this kind of elliptic
construction have different descriptions in their grammar books, and
different schools. Some of these descriptions are based on the use of
the participle, many are not.


How are such constructions analyzed in German grammar books that deal
with them, if any?



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?
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.






In this one, the word functioning for the past participle is not a past
participle. Can you square-peg it in a round hole, too?
English has the same kind of construction. This is why, if you want to
fit things to whichever English morphologic category happens to catch
your fancy, it's entirely up to you. Not to speakers of this or that
language.


If there is anyone that puts the German square peg in a supposed
English round hole, it is the writers of the German grammar books
themselves.

Ray

.

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