Some questions about Tamil relative clause

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Tiger98073
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Some questions about Tamil relative clause

Postby Tiger98073 » 2017-02-05, 4:53

Hi everyone, :oops:
I am a linguistics student who is working on analysis of Tamil relative clause.
I would like to whether there is any relative clauses in Tamil that comes in passive construction. :hmm:
For example, in English,
The man who was attacked by the gang did not fight back.

I have referred to a few Tamil grammar books that describes Tamil syntax, but I don't seem to be able to find such equivalence (the English example) in Tamil.

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Re: Some questions about Tamil relative clause

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-06, 4:35

I'm not sure about Tamil, but I know that at least in Malayalam, the passive voice is not very commonly used, and using it makes it impossible to recover the original subject of a sentence. I would think the same or something similar was true of Tamil. So it would not be possible to say "the man who was attacked by the gang," but it would be possible to say "the man who was attacked"; nevertheless, this would almost always be instead phrased as the equivalent of "the man who (the gang) attacked" (where "the gang" is optional, as the subject may be implied or intentionally left vague).


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