Noteseqon: Word order in the relative clause

Otseqon relative clauses are identical to regular clauses preceded by the specific determiner ti. As you will probably remember, which constituent is the subject and which is the predicate of a clause is flexible and based on information structure and not lexical categories:

i-maro-se ti man

1EXCL.SG.ERG-get.forgotten-POT DET bowl

‘I forgot the bowl.’

man ti maro-se iro

bowl DET get.forgotten-POT 1EXCL.SG

‘The bowl is what I forgot.’

(The difference in lack of person agreement and presence of the overt first person pronoun in the latter is the hallmark of the undergoer voice promoting the third person argument (= bowl) to the subject of marose ‘forget’ so that it can be extracted to be the head of the headless relative clause ti marose iro ‘the one I forgot’. The first variant could be phrased this way too (marose iro ti man), which would make the symmetry clearer, but the pragmatic context more complicated.)

Accordingly there are two orders for the corresponding relative clause:

ti man ti maro-se iro

DET bowl DET get.forgotten-POT 1EXCL.SG

‘the bowl that I forgot’

ti maro-se iro ti man

DET get.forgotten-POT 1EXCL.SG DET bowl

‘the bowl that I forgot’

The use of these is also conditioned by information structure and the principle of putting newer information first. I call the context for the former ‘descriptive’ and for the latter ‘contrastive-definite’. The former would be used when, for example, introducing a referent and providing some background information to allow the listener to identify it (for example if later one were to say ‘I found the bowl that I forgot’). The latter provides information to discriminate between two already-known things (for example if one were to say ‘Could you pass me the bowl that I forgot earlier? (instead of, for example, the other bowl right next to it)’). In this case the bowls are already likely quite salient in the mind of the listener, and the “missing” information is what is needed to differentiate between two or more similar things. Contrast this with the descriptive context, where the description is presupposed, and used to (re)introduce a referent that is not yet likely to be activated in the discourse.

It's worth noting that this is not in fact a difference of head - modifier order, rather, the first word is always the head. It's simply that the choice of head depends on information structure.

Since all NP-modification type structures in Otseqon are just stacking headless relative clauses, this also applies to adjectives (relative clauses with a stative verb) and indirect possession (relative clauses with a possessive classifier). Descriptive and contrastive-definite contexts are easily imaginable for these as well, for example ‘I saw a red bird on my way home’ versus ‘Ask the man in the shirt (not the man in the blue shirt next to him)’