Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Putting oral narratives into writing 331
eam na hae nom a panasu.
2pl.pron tam board 2pl.ipfv art raft.
‘(when) you board the raft.’
(San_02R.29)
(7) b. Enaa na tara tamuana nom ameam
1sg.pron tam watch always 1sg.ipfv 2pl.obj.pron
‘I always watch you’
be= am hae nom a= maa panasu
when 2pl.pron board 2pl.ipfv art pl raft
‘when you board the rafts.’
(San_02E.14)
The Teop word tabae ‘because’ in (7a) is not a subordinating conjunction as
its translation equivalent suggests, but a reduced form of the interrogative
phrase tea tabae ‘because of what?’ (prep-art what), so that a literal translation
of (7a) is ‘(Because of) what? I always watch you …’. This lexicalised
phrase introduces morpho-syntactically independent clauses which in contrast
to adverbial clauses show the full range of TAM marking of their predicates.
5.1.3 Integration by embedding: relative clause construction
The next example illustrates a further step on Lehmann’s typological scale of
clause linkage (Lehmann 1985). While the adverbial clauses are dependent,
though not embedded, and adjoined to the following or preceding clause by
the conjunction he ‘while, when’ or be ‘when’, relative clauses are dependent
and embedded. They either function as attributive modifiers of NPs or as arguments.
The latter type is called free or nominal relative clauses and will not
concern us here. The attributive relative clauses follow the noun phrase they
modify and are introduced by to.
The oral version of (8) shows a sequence of three paratactic clauses saying
that there was a demon, that the demon's name was paree, and that this demon
was a demon of the sea:
(8) a. (‘One poor man did not have a partner to sit in the back for him when
they were paddling in the sea.’)
Erau me tei nana a peha oraa,
and.so and be 3sg.ipfv art indef demon
‘And so, there was a demon,’