By “recursive relative clauses” I mean something along the line of “the cat ate the mouse that ate the cheese that was in the kitchen…”.
Does anything of the sort exist in Japanese? If you happen to have any references to papers or books about this topic, I would really appreciate it!
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You can do that by modifying nouns with adjectival clauses as far as I know. If you read you will encounter tons of them, so don’t worry too much about it, you will end up understanding it without even noticing.
Yes! You would use the plain past form of a verb, then combine it with the other desired clause. I could say “The nice woman that I met” and it would be: 私と会った優しい女の人. The clause acts almost as a modifier in the same way you’d combine an い adjective with a noun. Edit to add: Tofugu has great resources on all kinds of grammar points. I haven’t looked specifically to see if they have this, but I’d be willing to bet that they do have an article about it. It may be on its own or it may just be under -た form. I’m not sure.
I think so? What you posted translates pretty easily and directly into Japanese as 猫は台所にあったチーズを食べたネズミを食べた, just with some word order differences. Japanese does relative clauses by putting the relative bit before the noun (instead of using a word such as “that”), and you can put a relative clause inside another one.
Yes, and they get confusing/hard to parse after too much depth the same way as they do in English and for the same reason, though the specifics are different (adjectives are easier to parse than verbs, etc).
While not a book about the topic itself, this is a short book with that gimmick. I think you might find it interesting
https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/5456/#bd-look-inside