Phrasal typology and the interaction of topicalization, wh-movement, and extraposition (original) (raw)
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A Note on Some Even More Unusual Relative Clauses (2015)
In the spirit of Chomsky (1970) on 'passive', the notion 'relative clause' is unlikely to be a primitive of the language faculty. This was explicitly recognized in , to the extent that the whmovement operation that plays a role in the derivation of relative clauses also plays a role elsewhere (e.g in interrogatives). Rizzi (1997) might be interpreted as backtracking from this position insofar as the landing site for wh-movement in relatives is different (Spec,ForceP) from the landing site in interrogatives (Spec,FocP/IntP).
English relative clause constructions1
1997
Abstract This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy.
Semantic Constraints on Relative Clause Extraposition
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2005
Extraposed relative clauses pose certain problems for movement-based analyses. They seem to be insensitive to island constraints, and show intricate interactions with variable binding. Starting from the assumption that complement and modifier extraposition should not be treated alike, I present an analysis of relative clause extraposition that does not rely on movement. Instead, I assume that the same syntactic and semantic constraints interact to determine the grammaticality of both extraposed and non-extraposed relative clauses. Syntactically, the proposed constraints lead to the configurational superiority of the relative clause. This superiority has its origin in the semantics of the relative clause: the relative pronoun is referentially defective and remedies this deficiency by selecting an appropriate antecedent. The present analysis draws on data from German.
_____________________________________________________________________ This paper focuses on the comparison of the treatment of nominal relative clauses and dependent wh-interrogative clauses in A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Especially The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language -the third and latest in a series of comprehensive grammar references -sheds light on problems in distinguishing nominal relative clauses from dependent wh-interrogative clauses by analysing the former as clear noun phrases and the latter as clauses. _____________________________________________________________________
THE PREHEAD RELATIVE CLAUSE PROBLEM
Umut Özge (ed.) Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 67, 2013
has argued for the existence of a class of languages where all complex NPs belong to a single structural pattern. The point of departure for the three complex NP patterns in (1-3) have the same overt form in Japanese. (1) Relative clauses [[Taroo ga yaku] sakana] Taroo NOM broil fish (2) Propositional attitude noun complements (PANCs) [[Taroo ga sakana o yaita] syooko] Taroo NOM fish ACC broiled proof evidence that Taroo broiled (3) Perception noun complements (PNCs) [[Taroo ga sakana o yaku] nioi] Taroo NOM fish NOM broil smell
On Double-Headed Relative Clauses
Linguística : Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do Porto, 2011
The present article documents the presence in a number of languages and language families (as well as in various child languages) of relative clauses displaying simultaneously an internal and an external head, and considers the implications of this finding for the general theory of relative clauses.
The syntax and semantics of English relative clauses
Lingua, 1981
An analysis of English restrictive relative clauses is developed that accounts for many of the differences between them and three other clause types having the same internal structure, namely nonrestrictive relative clauses, cleft clauses, and 'pscudorelative' clauses as in Tllt~ ~1'11 ttwtt_r Attwictrtts who like hshll.
The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian
Cognition, 1988
A rich variety of factors have been proposed as possible determinants of differences in the ease of processing of relative clauses. These determinants include the grammatical role of the head, the shape of surface order configurations, the occurrence of interruptions of the main clause, and the presence or absence of morphological cues. The strict SVO word order of English makes it so that subject-modifying relatives necessarily interrupt the main clause, thus confounding the effects of role and interruption determinants. Hungarian, with its variable word order, allows us to achieve a somewhat better understanding of the separate effects of roles, configurations, interruptions, and morphological cues. A study using 144 different restrictive relative clause patterns in Hungarian provided evidence for the importance of three determinants of relative clause processing. First, the importance of perspective maintenance was indicated by the fact that SS sentences were the easiest to process and that SO were the most difficult. Second, the extreme difficulty subjects had in processing NNV sentences with a relative clause modifying the second noun indicated the importance of limits on fragment construction of chunks in a bottom-up parsing process. The use of antecedent tagging to mark extraposed relatives in SOV languages with variable order such as Hungarian and Georgian also indicated the importance of limits on fragment construction. Third, the conflict between focusing in the relative clause and focusing in the main clause indicated the importance of focus maintenance. A variety of other proposed determinants were found to be of little importance in accounting for the processing of relative clauses in Hungarian. 97 age of 73," where the additional information given by the relative clause is not essential for the identification of the head. There are a variety of non-finite clauses that are sometimes viewed as reduced relatives. These include sentences such as "The flowers sent to the performers had aphids." Some linguists view post-modifying prepositional phrases such as "on the team" in the sentence "Bill was the best player on the team" as elliptical relative clauses. There are extraposed relatives, such as "Bertram had a statue commissioned, which was to be poured with solid bronze." There are headless relatives, such as "What you don't know can't hurt you." Within each of these major construction types, a variety of particular patterns exist. First, the relative clause can modify virtually any type of nominal head. It can have a subject head as in "The girl he had just met gave the soldier a box of cigars," an indirect object head as in "Kim gave the soldier she had met a box of cigars," or a prepositional object head as in "Kim gave a box of cigars to the soldier who she had met." Relatives can even take adjectives or whole clauses as heads, as in "Lila painted the kitchen purple, which was a very lively color," or sentential relatives like "Things later improved, which surprised him." Within the relative clause, the head can also take on any role. It can be a subject as in "Kim gave the soldier who met her a box of cigars"; it can be a prepositional object, as in "Kim gave a box of cigars to the soldier to whom she had earlier given a peach"; or it can be an indirect object as in "Kim gave a box of cigars to the soldier she had given a peach."