Subclause Reform

The Subclause Reform is a proposal that changes the grammar of subclauses to fix some ambiguities, and make them more naturalistic.

Motivation

In official Toaq, content clauses have the exact same grammar as the main clause of a sentence, and can appear wherever a determiner phrase might appear. But this grammar actually turns out to be ambiguous! Consider the following sentence:

Feq jí ꝡä za ruqshua râo ní nuaq.

Which verb does the adjunct râo ní nuaq modify? It's not clear where the subclause ends. This example could mean either "I remember that tonight, it's going to rain" or "Tonight, I remember that it's going to rain"!

Another tricky thing is that in official Toaq, you can underfill verbs, for example by using a transitive verb intransitively:

Leo nháo da.

Now how would we say "It delights me that they tried"? If we allow verbs in subclauses to be underfilled, this also creates ambiguity!

Jaıca ꝡä leo nháo jí.

Again, it's not clear where the subclause ends, because jí could belong to either the inner or outer clause, depending on which verb is underfilled. Clearly, we need a better solution.

Relative clauses

To avoid ambiguity when a relative clause has a trailing adverb, we simply ban trailing adverbs from appearing anywhere inside a relative clause. So if you see an adverb after a relative clause, you can know for sure that it belongs to the outer clause:

Pıe jí cháı, ꝡë baı tâocıa súq hóa.
I drink the tea that you unintentionally made.

Pıe jí cháı, ꝡë baı súq hóa, tâocıa.
I unintentionally drink the tea that you made.

Furthermore, a relative clause may not be underfilled. Instead, we use prefixes like hao- to explicitly reduce a verb's arity when necessary:

Póq, ꝡë chum hạochuq hóa
The person who is eating

Content clauses

To avoid ambiguity when a content clause has a trailing adverb, we say that subclauses starting with ꝡä/lä/etc. can only appear at the very end of a clause, coming after the outer clause's trailing adverbs:

Zaı jí, ꝡä jıa tao nháo hóq nhûq súq.
I hope that they will do it for your sake.

Zaı jí nhûq súq, ꝡä jıa tao nháo hóq.
I hope for your sake that they will do it.

Verbs that expect a content clause complement, such as dua, zaı, leo, teqga, will use the complement to fill in their final slot, and moreover they may never be underfilled. But if you want to use a content clause with a verb that doesn't expect them, or you want to use one as the subject of a transitive verb, then you can use the word có, which is a lot like the 'it' in English "It delights me that they tried".

Gı có, ꝡä tı súq ní.
It's good that you're here.

Jaıca có jí, ꝡä leo nháo.
It delights me that they tried.

Relative content clauses

To turn a content clause into a nominalized construct, like English "the fact that" or "the plan to", we use a brand-new piece of grammar: a relative content clause. The word ꝡä attaches to a determiner phrase as if it was a relative clause, and says that the phrase's propositional content is given by the content clause that follows.

Cho jí sío, ꝡä mala tı sía seq úmo ní rıaq.
I like the thought that no one apart from us has ever been here before.

Táosıo, lä seraq nhâna kú râo núaq já, bï chı duı hıam jí hóq.
I think the plan to attack them at night is too dangerous.

Just like normal relative clauses, these are not allowed to contain trailing adverbs, and may not be underfilled. And just as we have ꝡé as an abbreviation for ló, ꝡë, we also have ꝡá as an abbreviation for ló, ꝡä.

Hạle, ꝡá sho suhu hóe, ꝡá dana súq jí.
It is more likely that the sun turns into a pig than that you beat me.

Má tı ríaq Éoropa, bï bu moaq jí hụ́ma.
As for whether that place is in Europe, I do not remember that.

Notice that nominalizing a content clause with ꝡá allows it to appear directly in topic or subject position, whereas a ꝡä clause is much more limited in its positioning.

Nullary verbs

As a final note, we need to change nullary verbs to take a dummy argument, or else this kind of sentence would still be ambiguous:

Feq jí ꝡá za ruqshua râo ní nuaq.

This sentence now becomes:

Feq jí, ꝡá za ruqshua râo ní nuaq ía.
I sense that it's going to rain tonight.

This dummy argument ía corresponds to the 'it' in the English translation; it doesn't refer to anything, but is necessary for the sentence to be grammatical.

Unresolved issues

This proposal isn't perfect. In particular, relative content clauses are subject to some of the same ambiguity as relative clauses:

Póq po kúe, ꝡë zao súq hóa

Júna po sío, ꝡä hao ráı

These clauses could conceivably attach to either the DP outside the predicatizer, or the DP inside the predicatizer. Fundamentally, predicatizers and object incorporation both create verb forms in which multiple 𝘯Ps "pile up" at the right edge, which makes 𝘯P adjunction problematic.

But relative content clauses also create a new case of ambiguity:

Aojaı póq, ꝡë cho hó sío, ꝡä hao ráı, ꝡä luq tú.

We could bracket this as either Aojaı póq, ꝡë [cho hó sío, ꝡä hao ráı], ꝡä luq tú or Aojaı póq, ꝡë [cho hó sío], ꝡä hao ráı, ꝡä luq tú. The problem here is that content clauses look the same no matter whether they're used as relatives or as verbal arguments. One way to fix this is to say that có may never be covert:

Aojaı póq, ꝡë cho hó sío, ꝡä hao ráı, có, ꝡä luq tú.

However, it's perhaps a bit cumbersome to say có, ꝡä or có, lä all the time. Admittedly, serial verbs and ꝡá might be able to make up for the verbosity of có. But I'm hopeful that a solution to the 𝘯P adjunction problem might fix this ambiguity at the same time, so for now I'm leaving it unresolved.