mizuz wrote:My conlang is still at a very embryonic stage but I'm planning to make it head-final and SOV (don't know if this is of any importance when it comes to relative clauses).
Insofar as there are certain observed correlations between a language's overall typology and how it handles relative clauses. SOV languages seem to be split relatively equally on whether relatives are prenominal or postnominal. If your language is strictly head-final, then relative clauses should precede the NPs they modify, but plenty of predominately head-initial languages allow postnominal relative clauses (and some allow both types). Plus it's a conlang, so you should feel free to ignore these generalisations (which are only based on a small selection of natural human languages anyhow). Your possibilities are wide open.
The
Wikipedia article gives a solid overview of the common types or relative clauses with examples from various non-European languages. My first introduction to languages which handle these quite differently from English was Korean, which is identical to
Japanese in being strongly head-final and in treating almost all noun modifiers as verbs (to the extent that "true adjective" is a very small category in the language). My first real introduction to the
resumptive pronoun strategy was
Irish. (It is found to some degree in informal English but it such a part of Irish syntax that it even influences the choice of verb.)
It's worth mentioning that some languages use relative clauses rarely, if at all. Pirahã lacks them entirely. (Everett claims it lacks any sort of embedding or recursion.) Hawai'ian supposedly uses them rather sparingly. Alternatives include
parataxis (e.g. "This is my friend, he has a shop, the shop sells goods in cans") and participial modifiers ("This is my shop-owning friend who sells canned goods").
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons