Nepalese Linguistics 1994 №11

Chief Editor: K. B. Maharjan
Publisher: Linguistic Society of Nepal
Publication date: 1994
Number of pictures: 66This paper looks at the different relative clause (RC) types in Vedic and classical Sanskrit (Skt) in the light of typological theory. It will be shown that the presence of both prenominal and postnominal RCs in Sanskrit does not reflect a word order shift in Sanskrit Also, data from modern Indie and several other OV languages show that there is no predictable correlation between the type of RC a language has and its surface structure word order. One has to see how the syntax of RCs works in Sanskrit. Word order in Sanskrit is quite flexible; the nominal and verbal modifiers can occur before or after their head. Relative clauses enjoy the same flexibility in that they can occur prenominally, postonominally or clause-finally. However there is one restriction. No relative clause can occur internally within the main clause. This constraint on clause-internal embedding interacts with different word orders in the matrix to motivate postnominal and extraposed RCs. In this paper I have proposed a psycholinguistic explanation for the above phenomenon.
The paper has three section. In Section1. we will looks at the syntax of RCs in the Vedic and propose base rules and transformations to account for the different types of RCs. Following this, we will propose a Clause-internal Embedding Constraint (CIEC) to prevent embedding internally within a clause in Sanskrit. Later we will see that this CIEC interacts with different word orders in the matrix motivating postnominal and extraposed RCs. A psycholinguistic explanation will be proposed for this phenomenon. In section 2, further evidence for this phenomenon will be given from classical Sanskrit and modem Hindi and other Indie languages. In section 3 we will consider the important implications that our discussion has for word order typology.