Gram - SEAS

200 7 Grammaticalization across clauses
(58) mTamnaun-a huwantan ISBATU -an
Tamna-ACC alive-ACC they:seized PARTICLE-him
uruHattua uwatet.
city:H.:DlRECTIONAL brought:3SG
'Tamnau (whom) they seized alive, he brought to Hattua.'
(Justus 1976: 234)
Justus argues that the use of the relative-interrogative-indefinite pronoun kw- to
mark the focal NP (,utensil') in thematic clauses of the type in (57) (,utensil he gave
to someone') is a characteristic of somewhat later Hittite texts than is illustrated
by (58). But even at this later stage, she says, the clause with the marked NP is
only loosely connected to the "nucleus." An example such as (57), therefore, is
to be construed as something like 'He gave a (some) utensil to someone and he
didn't seal it,' with ku-it functioning as the indefinite marker of a noun phrase in
an independent clause rather than a "relative pronoun." Justus suggests that when
correlative clauses emerge, at first what appears to be a correlative clause is in fact
a topic clause that states a theme whose domain is not just the next clause but,
potentially, several following clauses. Eventually the kw- came to be understood
as grammatically linking the theme clause to the following clause, as evidenced by
comparison of earlier and later copies of the same legal text (Justus 1976: 237-8).
What we have in Hittite, then, is an example of a relative clause construction
which was originally not formally embedded but simply part of the way in which
discourses are organized in a particular language, and which subsequently came
to be grammaticalized as an embedded clause.
The preceding remarks about the emergence of relative clauses are valid only
for the postnominal and correlative types. Another type of relative clause, known
as the prenominal type, is represented by the Tamil example in (59):
(59) Anda paaDattai paDitta paiyaNai kuuppiDu.
that lesson:ACC leam:PARTIT boy:ACC call:IMP
'Call the boy that learned that lesson.' (Klaiman 1976: 160)
There is no relative pronoun, and the relative clause is embedded before the matrix
noun and linked to it by a participial or special relative ending on the verb. Ac­
cording to Keenan (1985), only languages of the OV type have this kind of relative
(though they typically also use postnominal relatives as well).
The prenominal, participial type of relative clause represented in the Tamil ex­
ample is probably not diachronically related to the other types we have discussed.
It is in fact difficult to show any grammaticalization of prenominal relative clauses
at all, since languages that have them appear always to have had them in virtually
just that form. If change occurs, it does not result from any gradual extraposing
or postposing of the participial relative but by starting anew, as it were, with the