🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan21.052233.17711@trl.oz.au>, jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:

[Stuff omitted]

> Breton has
> a very strange phonology, by the way, and, if I read correctly 
> between the lines of Pierre Trepoz's Grammaire Bretonne, stranger
> points of grammar: in certain types of phrases, you cannot distinguish
> between subject and object. The only other language I know of that
> does that, and is famous for it, is Lisu, spoken somwhere in Nepal,
> is memory serves..

This shortcoming is hardly peculiar.  *Many* languages lose the ability
to distinguish subject and object in certain situations.  Here's a
German example:

	Das ist die Frau, die meine Grossmutter ermordet hat.
	'That is the woman who killed my grandmother.'
	'That is the woman whom my grandmother killed.'

Word order cannot be used to disambiguate this sort of relative clause,
since with the relative clause-initial and the verb clause-final,
there's nothing left but _meine Grossmutter_, whose grammatical func-
tion (and continued existence) are in doubt.

Strangely, Germans rarely notice the ambiguity.  If asked to translate
such a sentence, they will produce a translation and swear it is correct,
but about half will kill off the grandmother, the other half the other
woman.

Pragmatically, of course, such a sentence is uttered only in contexts
where speaker and hearer both know who was done in.

By the way, aren't there some French constructions where it's unclear
whether a noun following an infinitive is an object or subject?  I
could add another German example of a different type:

	Wir lassen ihn nicht operieren.
	'We won't let him operate.'
	'We won't let him be operated on.'

Here it is unclear whether accuasative _ihn_ is the object or the natural
subject of the infinitive _operieren_.

--Leo Connolly