Auto-hóa

Relative pronoun ellipsis, also known as hóa elision or just auto-hóa, is the “study” of interpreting omission of the relative pronoun hóa in a relative clause phrase.

Scary English words

• Ellipsis (think of the ellipsis symbol, …) is the act of omitting part of a phrase, or a whole phrase, with the expectation that pragmatics and context will convey the missing phrase. Some kinds of ellipsis are solidifed into grammatical rules: She went to the store but I didn’t (…go to the store). (Note that another analysis of this kind of ellipsis interprets didn’t as a so-called pro-verb – like a pronoun but for verb phrases. This interpretation is outside of the purview of this article.)
• Elision technically refers to the act of removing single or multiple sounds (for example, it would /ɪt ˈwʊd/ → it’d /ɪtəd/ → /ɪd/), but in loglang communities, the term has taken on the meaning of the disposure of unneeded particles (such as Lojban’s elision of terminators – kinds of closing bracket particles – which allows one to say lo jbobau cu xamgu rather than lo jbobau ku cu xamgu vau iau).
• Broadly speaking, a relative clause is a dependent clause which introduces additional information about another entity – for example, in he was the person I wanted to find, I wanted to find is a relative clause of the person (it describes what kind of person). In this scenario, the person is termed the head or the antecedent of the relative clause.
• A relative pronoun is one which refers to the antecedent. Such are hard to find in English, but they appear on occasion: a child who knows I love them (them = a child. Also note that a child is implicitly the subject of the relative clause – the one who knows). All Toaq relative clauses are formulated in a way that makes the relative pronoun hóa easy to use – for example, ‘a child who is big’ = deo säo hóa (literally child such that it is big). Other pronouns may be used as antecedents since the antecedent pronouns update: deo säo hó, where hó is the animate pronoun (he/she/they/it, for humans and animals performing roles thereof).
• Consequently, relative pronoun ellipsis occurs when hóa is omitted for one reason or another.

The battle of auto-hóa

Right after an avant-garde rap performance by nuogaı, fagri/Hoaqgıo posted a taxonomy of viable hóa elision proposals. They are enumerated as follows:

The Auto-Hóa Suite, by Hoaqgıo (2020-02-02)

1. Required hóa.

   hóa must appear in every relative clause.

2. Semi-required hóa.

   hóa must appear in every relative clause, unless that clause is completely empty, in which case hóa fills the first slot.

3. Lazy initial auto-hóa.

   If hóa does not appear in the relative clause at all, then it is inserted before all of the other arguments.

4. Eager initial auto-hóa.

   hóa is inserted before all of the other arguments even if it does appear elsewhere in the clause, and can only be cancelled with an explicit fı.

5. Lazy structural final auto-hóa.

   If hóa does not appear in the relative clause at all, then it is inserted after all of the other arguments at the top level.

6. Eager structural final auto-hóa.

   A hóa is inserted after all of the other arguments at the top-level unless the top-level slots are all filled.

7. Lazy pre-terminator final auto-hóa.

   If a hóa does not appear in the relative clauese at all, it is inserted as an automatic final word in the phrase (e.g., after explicit terminators but before implicit ones).

8. Eager pre-terminator final auto-hóa.

   hóa is inserted as an automatic final word in the phrase (e.g., after explicit terminators but before implicit ones) unless the phrase is full.

9. Hybrid hóa.

   The constructs lú, lü, lủ, and räı could have different rules of hóa. For example, eager initial auto-hóa in häo clauses together with semi-required hóa in lü/lú clauses has been suggested (the auto-hóa form for lú would then be ke häo).

The Auto-Hóa Suite by Hoemaı (2020-05-31)

TODO

uakci^talk’s anti-compromise auto-hóa (2021-09-20)

TODO(uakci^talk)

The Auto-Hóa Matrix (derivative gruël by yours truly uakci^talk; 2021-09-23)

The comprehensive list as presented above exhausts the sensible possibilities for hóa filling; however, given the medium of HTML, we can do one better and arrange the lazy–eager distinction across a matrix:

implicature-free diehards		lazy (overridable)			eager (forcible)
required	semi-required	initial (hóa then arguments)		lazy initial	eager initial
		final	structural final (arguments then hóa)	lazy structural-final initial	eager structural-final initial
			pre-terminator final (possibly nested terms then hóa)	lazy pre-terminator-final initial	eager pre-terminator-final initial
← hybrid (different rules for räı … hóa, lu … hóa, râı … ja) →

And this table gives examples (⇒ meanıng ‘turns into’):

❌ fä ✅ fä hóa	✅ fä ⇒ fä hóa	fä á ú ⇒ fä hóa á ú fä á hóa ⇒ (no change)	fä á ú ⇒ fä hóa á ú fä á hóa ⇒ fä hóa á hóa fä fı á hóa ⇒ (no change)
		fä â ú ⇒ fä â ú na hóa fä â ú hóa ⇒ (no change)	fä â ú ⇒ fä â ú na hóa fä â ú hóa ⇒ fä â ú hóa na hóa fä á ú í ⇒ (no change; fä full)
		düa jí gî ⇒ düa jí gî hóa söq jí gî ja na hóa ⇒ (no change)	düa jí gî ⇒ düa jí gî hóa söq jí gî ja ⇒ (invalid; gı is full) söq jí gî ja na ⇒ söq jí gî ja na hóa
(for example, say, räq jí ⇒ räq hóa jí, but lü dua jí ⇒ lü dua jí hóa)

Discussion

TODO: poignant summary owo