Relativization in Ikota - Jillian Ashenbrener (1)

Ledgeway, Adam / Maiden, Martin (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1029-1040., 2016

This paper discusses a typologically unusual relativization strategy attested in several Southeastern Mande languages. In this construction, the relativized noun phrase appears in its own non-reduced clause and is referred to by a pronoun in the main clause, as in constructions with correlative clauses (literally, “That man invited us, I am writing to him” for ‘I am writing to the man who invited us’). Unlike in typical cases of correlative clauses, however, the clause containing the relativized noun phrase appears inside the main clause, immediately preceding the resumptive pronoun (literally, “I am writing – that man invited us – to him”). I discuss the syntactic properties of this unusual construction and suggest a possible diachronic path for its development. In particular, I argue that the rise of clause-internal correlatives in Southeastern Mande is licensed by a typologically unusual syntactic property of those languages: clause-internal extraposition of noun phrases, which is in turn related to the clause-level adjunction of postpositional phrases. More generally, besides adding a previously unattested type to the typology of relativization strategies, I seek to illustrate how typologically unusual morphosyntactic properties provide the basis for the subsequent development of rare or unique constructions (the “Propagation of Rara” principle).

2017

This monograph investigates A’-dependencies in Standard German, Alemannic and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted. The first part of the book addresses headed relative clauses cross-linguistically, but with a focus on reconstruction effects in German. I argue in favor of the Matching Analysis of relative clauses and against the more prominent Raising Analysis by showing (a) that the Matching Analysis is unaffected by the many fundamental technical problems the Raising Analysis is confronted with and (b) that the Matching Analysis provides a better and more comprehensive account of reconstruction effects. Part two provides an overview of the syntax of resumption and argues that island-insensitive resumption is best accounted for in terms of base-generation. Part three shows that an important part of the relativization system in German and Dutch, long relativization, involves a hitherto ignored construction termed resumptive prolepsis. This construction is characterized by base-generation of the operator in the matrix middle-field and a resumptive pronoun in the position of the variable. It is shown that it involves short A’-movement in the matrix clause, empty operator movement in the complement clause and an ellipsis operation that links the two operators. Part four discusses in relativization in Swiss German. The first aspect is teh distribution of gaps and resumptives in local relativization, which is shown to have important theoretical implications. I argue that the distribution can best be accounted for if local relativization involves Case-attraction. The second aspect is long relativizaiton, which is shown to involve a more abstract version of resumptive prolepsis. Through a detailed examination of reconstruction effects and the properties of resumption in these constructions, the book provides new evidence for the role of ellipsis in A’-movement and for a base-generation analysis of resumption. More generally, it makes an important contribution to the modeling of long-distance dependencies and the study of A'-syntax.

2020

This paper outlines the major structural differences between the English and Shupamem (an SVO Bantu language spoken in western part of Cameroon) relative clauses. It examines the structure of the relative morphemes, the relative clause types, and the relativization strategies in these two languages. In English, relative clauses are introduced by pronouns which indicate the position relativized and the syntactic/semantic role of the head noun (Comrie 1998). Also, English relative pronouns can be omitted in object relative clauses without affecting the sentence grammaticality and semantic interpretation. In Shupamem however, the relativizer is a dicontinuous morpheme which encircles the relative domain: the first item (jʉə́ for singular or ʃʉə́ for plural) introduces the relative clause while the second one (nə́) closes the relative domain. Unlike the English relative pronouns, none of these morphemes encodes the syntactic/semantic role of the antecedent. Similarly, the deletion of a ...

Functional Heads across time: syntactic reanalysis and change., 2022

This paper explores the syntactic status of che and (il) qual(e) relativizers, i.e. what are standardly referred to as relative complementizers and relative pronouns, in Old and Modern Italian and Italian varieties and proposes a unified analysis for both types of items. It takes into account the ongoing debate regarding the categorial status of relativizers (

Folia Linguistica, 2019

Spanish relative clauses, as in other languages, can contain a resumptive pronoun or other resumptive element. This study attempts to explain what factors favor the presence of such resumptive elements in the production of Spanish relative clauses. In order to do so, 1237 relatives clauses were extracted from an oral corpus of Peninsular Spanish conversations. A total of 18 factors, some new and some known from previous studies, pertaining to semantic and syntactic processing difficulties, were coded as potentially influencing the choice of a resumptive pronoun. Multivariate analysis (conditional tree and random forest) was then used to determine the significant factors and the most explicative minimal model. The results suggest that the conditions with the most impact are related to difficulties in determining the function of the relativizer. A discussion follows about how these difficulties relate to the different factors studied and how they could be due to a looser relationship ...

This work is about resumptive and non-resumptive relative clauses (RCs) in the three big Ibero-Romance languages: Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. In (1), the examined structures are exemplified for Spanish: (1a.) No conozco el hombre que viste _ ayer. “I don’t know the man that you saw yesterday.” (1b.) Es este el hombre que le enviaron el libro. “This is the man to whom they sent the book.” (1c.) Es este el hombre a quien le enviaron el libro. “This is the man to whom they sent the book.” (1a.) displays a non-resumptive, or canonical, RC, which is characterized by the canonical use of a relativizing operator and a gap in the subordinate’s object position, a piece of evidence which has induced most of the generative literature to assume wh-movement of the relative operator in the sense of Chomsky (1977). The last two decades, however, have seen a big debate regarding the exact derivational analysis, starting with Kayne’s (1994) antisymmetry theory and the following focus on recons...

2015

The purpose of the present paper is to describe basic facts about relative clause constructions in two related languages spoken at the northern edge of theCameroonianGrassfields,MungbamandMundabli. Though the two languages are notmutually intelligible, there is considerable contact between their speakers, and basic as well as non-trivial formal properties relevant to relative clause constructions are to a large extent isomorphic in the two languages. We therefore find it profitable to present relative clause constructions in the two languages as variations on a single basic system.

Studies in Language 40:4 (2016), 733–764

This is an extended version of the published paper. The full version is more elaborate with regard to the data and references that support the claims made in the main textthus containing substantially more footnotes to point the reader to the relevant work. Additionally, §2.3 on accessibility in relativization includes more phenomena and examples than the printed version and, most importantly, this extended version features a section on supplementary relative clauses ( §2.4) that cannot be found in the publication at all.

1989

Linguistic Typology, 2024

This paper has two main goals. One is to introduce a type of "headless" (or "antecedentless") relative clause that presents a gap strategy and that has not been sufficiently discussed in the typological literature. The other is to show that this type of headless relative clause with a gap is a characteristic trait of Mesoamerican languages, since it exists in many languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area as an important constructional option in their relativization syntax, independently of the genetic relationships of the language in question. Two types of headless relative clauses are well known to date: one involving a relativization strategy with a relative pronoun (e.g., I wore what you asked me to wear) and another with a light head, introduced by Citko (2004), somewhat comparable to I wore the one that you asked me to wear. The third type of headless relative clause discussed here presents a gap (i.e., there is no manifestation of the relativized term in the relative clause). It would be equivalent to saying 'I wore you asked me to wear'. The phenomenon we study here is interesting both from a typological and areal point of view.

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2013 Under the Supervision of Professors Hamid Ouali and Fred Eckman The new developments in syntactic theory under Minimalism reconsiders the relation between the language faculty and general cognitive systems whereby language acquisition is accomplished by the interaction of Chomsky (2005)'s three factors: (F1) a minimally specified UG (Genetic endowment); (F2) Primary Linguistic Data (PLD), i.e., input; and (F3) non-language faculty-specific v

The present contribution surveys prominent patterns in the typology of relative and adverbial clauses, with particular reference to the notion of embedding. To this end, we unfold the notion of embedding into a three-dimensional space consisting of a functional, a distributional and a formal axis along which a clause may be argued to be embedded into a (constituent of a) main clause. We show how these dimensions of embedding interact with each other to yield cross-linguistically recurrent subtypes of relative and adverbial clauses. In doing so, we also point to correlations between these dimensions and other grammatical properties of the non-argument clause, such as accessibility to relativization or the omissibility of overt markers of the embedding relationship.