SIL Electronic Working Papers 2003-003

Three distinct relativization strategies are used in Tadaksahak: a relative pronoun strategy, a gap strategy, and one that uses the morpheme sa (hereafter, the sa-strategy). One parameter that distinguishes these strategies is whether the relative clause is restrictive (relative pronoun and gap strategies) or nonrestrictive (sa-strategy); this difference is reviewed in section 1. The parameter that usually distinguishes the two restrictive strategies is whether the referent of the head noun is definite (relative pronoun strategy-sec. 3.1) or indefinite (gap strategy-sec. 3.2). Section 4 is devoted to the sa-strategy. The paper also discusses which grammatical relations can be relativized by each strategy (sec. 2), and some motivations for left-dislocating nominal constituents that contain relative clauses (sec. 5).