My intuition says to me that this should be a simple “私が後ろで寝ている木”, or for
instance, as a hypothetical example, to express “The knife inside of which I
cut the meat” opposed to “the knife I cut the meat with” one could use
“私が肉を中で切るナイフ”. Yet, I can find almost no citations of similar grammatical
constructs in Japanese and I can't consciously recall a single case I
encountered it though I might have. Surely a simple “私が寝ている木” would not be the
only option as this cannot express whether one sleeps behind, in front, or
inside the tree.

I know that in most cases with available context, one would simply say
“ホームレスが寝ている橋” to mean “a bridge under which a homeless man sleeps” but surely
there must be cases where the relative location of the action is not clear
from context and must be disambiguate as well? Do we simply say
“その橋の下でホームレスが寝ている橋”?
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2023-06-06T04:24:21.370
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2023-06-06T04:24:21.370
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question
grammar relative-clauses ambiguous-relative-clauses
How does one explicitly express “the tree behind which I sleep” and similar things?