The status of CP and the tensed complementizer that in the developing L2 grammars of English

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Usha Lakshmanan ◽  
Larry Selinker
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
The Status ◽  
Maximal Projection ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses

In this article we examine the development of the complementizer system in child L2 grammars of English, and we show that C and its maximal projection CP are operative from the very beginning. Next, we focus on the development of the tensed complementizer that. We provide evidence which suggests that the tensed complementizer in embedded declaratives may be treated as an obligatorily null complementizer by these child L2 learners. We then examine restrictive relative clauses produced by our subjects. The evidence indicates that the tensed complementizer is first realized overtly as that in the relative clause domain. We speculate on the possible reasons as to why the relative clause domain should trigger the emergence of the overt tensed complementizer and we argue that recent proposals by Rizzi (1990) for a typology of complementizer types enable us to account for these child L2 developmental facts.

scholarly journals Non-restrictive relative clauses in Arabic

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Abdulrahman A Alqurashi
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Preliminary Analysis ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Modern Standard Arabic ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Restrictive Relatives ◽  
Modern Standard ◽  
Minimalist Syntax

This paper discusses the syntax of non-restrictive relative clauses in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). It provides a thorough description of their structures and attempts to offer a preliminary analysis within the transformation framework: Minimalist syntax. Two relativization strategies are available for Arabic non-restrictive relative clauses. The first strategy is similar to that of definite restrictive relatives in which the relative clause is initiated by ʔallaðiwhich is a relative complementizer, whereas the second strategy is a unique one in which the relative clause is initiated by the special particle wa, appears to be a specifying coordinator, along with the complementizer ʔallaði. The paper also argues that De-Vries’s (2006) coordinate approach to appositive relatives can provide a straightforward account for some the facts of non-restrictive relative clauses in Arabic.

scholarly journals Relative clause comprehension revisited: commentary on Eisenberg (2002)

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
EVAN KIDD
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
Time Processing ◽  
The Real ◽  
Syntactic Development ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Requirements Acquisition

Eisenberg (2002) presents data from an experiment investigating three- and four-year-old children's comprehension of restrictive relative clauses (RC). From the results she argues, contrary to Hamburger & Crain (1982), that children do not have discourse knowledge of the felicity conditions of RCs before acquiring the syntax of relativization. This note evaluates this conclusion on the basis of the methodology used, and proposes that an account of syntactic development needs to be sensitive to the real-time processing requirements acquisition places on the learner.

scholarly journals Participial Relative Clauses

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Sleeman
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Reduced Form ◽  
Condensed Form ◽  
The Status ◽  
Subject Noun ◽  
Style Of Writing ◽  
Colloquial Speech

Relative clauses of which the predicate contains a present, past, or passive participle can be used in a reduced form. Although it has been shown that participial relative clauses cannot always be considered to be non-complete variants of full relative clauses, they are generally called reduced relative clauses in the literature. Since they differ from full relative clauses in containing a non-finite predicate, they are also called non-finite relative clauses. Another type of non-finite relative clause is the infinitival relative clause. In English, in participial relative clauses, the antecedent noun is interpreted as the subject of the predicate of the relative clause. Because of this restriction, the status of relative clause has been put into doubt for participial adnominal modifiers, especially, because in a language such as English, they can occur in pre-nominal position, whereas a full relative clause cannot. While some linguists analyze both pre-nominal and post-nominal participles as verbal, others have argued that participles are essentially adjectival categories. In a third type of analysis, participles are divided into verbal and adjectival ones. This also holds for adnominal participles. Besides the relation to full relative clauses and the category of the participle, participial relative clauses raise a number of other interesting questions, which have been discussed in the literature. These questions concern the similarity or difference in interpretation of the pre-nominal and the post-nominal participial clause, restrictions on the type of verb used in past participial relative clauses, and similarities and differences between the syntax and semantics of participial clauses in English and other languages. Besides syntactic and semantic issues, participial relative clauses have raised other questions, such as their use in texts. Participial relative clauses have been studied from a diachronic and a stylistic point of view. It has been shown that the use of reduced forms such as participial relative clauses has increased over time and that, because of their condensed form, they are used more in academic styles than in colloquial speech. Nonetheless, they have proven to be used already by very young children, although in second language acquisition they are used late, because their condensed form is associated with an academic style of writing. Since passive or past participles often have the same form as the past tense, it has been shown that sentences containing a subject noun modified by a post-nominal past or passive participle are difficult to process, although certain factors may facilitate the processing of the sentence.

scholarly journals Some kind of relative clause

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Jon Ander Mendia
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Special Case

Amount Relatives (ARs) differ from restrictive relative clauses in that they do notrefer to a particular object denoted by the head of the relative clause, but to an amount of suchobjects (Carlson, 1977a; Heim, 1987). Traditionally, ARs have been regarded as degree expressions.In this paper I argue against this view and propose instead that amount interpretations ofrelative clauses are in fact a special case of kind interpretation.Keywords: kind reference, amounts, relative clauses.

scholarly journals An HPSG analysis of the non-integrated wh-relative clauses in German

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anke Holler
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
Abstract Entity ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses

In this article, the so-called wh-relative clause construction is investigated. The German wh-relative clauses are syntactically relevant as they show both, root clause and subordinate clause properties. They matter semantically because they are introduced by a wh-anaphor that has to be resolved by an appropriate abstract entity of the matrix clause. Additionally, the wh-relative clause construction is discourse-functionally peculiar since it evokes coherence. Besides these interesting empirical characteristics, whrelatives raise important theoretical questions. It is argued that the standard HPSG theory has to be extended to account for non-restrictive relative clauses in general, and to cope with the particular properties of the wh-relative construction.

scholarly journals Raising and matching in Pharasiot Greek relative clauses: A diachronic reconstruction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
METIN BAGRIACIK ◽  
LIEVEN DANCKAERT
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Landing Site ◽  
Functional Structure ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses

This paper studies the structure and origin of prenominal and postnominal restrictive relative clauses in Pharasiot Greek. Though both patterns are finite and introduced by the invariant complementizer tu, they differ in two important respects. First, corpus data reveal that prenominal relatives are older than their postnominal counterparts. Second, in the present-day language only prenominal relatives involve a matching derivation, whereas postnominal ones behave like Head-raising structures. Turning to diachrony, we suggest that prenominal relatives came into being through morphological fusion of a determiner t- with an invariant complementizer u. This process entailed a reduction of functional structure in the left periphery of the relative clause, to the effect that the landing site for a raising Head was suppressed, leaving a matching derivation as the only option. Postnominal relatives are analyzed as borrowed from Standard Modern Greek. Our analysis corroborates the idea that both raising and matching derivations for relatives must be acknowledged, sometimes even within a single language.

Child and adult construal of restrictive relative clauses: Knowledge of grammar and differential effects of syntactic context

2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
CATHY FRAGMAN ◽  
HELEN GOODLUCK ◽  
LINDSAY HEGGIE
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Mature Adult ◽  
Adult Performance ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Syntactic Context ◽  
Selection Of

We report four act-out experiments testing the sensitivity of adults and three- to five-year-old children to the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in English. Specifically, we test knowledge of the fact that restrictive relative clauses cannot modify a proper name head, and of the fact that relatives introduced by that (as opposed to a wh-pronoun) are obligatorily restrictive. Both children and adults show knowledge of these properties. No support was found for the hypothesis that children extend the block on proper name heads to wh-relatives. Both children and adults are sensitive to the syntactic context (double object vs. existential) in which the relative clause is embedded. However, adults differ from children in four respects. First, in the double object context, adults are more likely than children to commit the error of construing a that relative as referring to a proper name head. Second, the effect of syntactic context on selection of a head is larger for adults than for children. Third, for adults, but not for children, the effect of syntactic context interacts with the type of relative clause. Fourth, adults, but not children, are influenced by whether they hear the existential context before the double object context. We propose that by three to four years of age children have acquired an adult-like grammar of relative clauses, and that the differences we see in child and adult performance can be attributed to that grammar in combination with a mature (adult) or immature (child) sentence processing capacity.

Descriptive relative clauses in Austro-Bavarian German

2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Wiltschko
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Upper Austria ◽  
Definite Articles ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Semantic Properties

AbstractThis article discusses the syntactic and semantic properties of descriptive relative clauses, a type of relative clause discussed in the literature on Chinese. It is argued that descriptive relative clauses are found in the dialect of Upper Austria, a version of Bavarian German. In particular this dialect has a set of reduced definite articles that are used for discourse referents that are intrinsically uniquely identifiable, as a matter of world knowledge. As such, they cannot be restricted by a relative clause, where restriction is taken to exclude alternatives. Such DPs can, however, be modified by descriptive relative clauses. I propose that descriptive relative clauses attach to NP while restrictive relative clauses attach to nP. Thus, the article contributes to determining whether there are different relative clauses associated with different layers of projections in the nominal domain.

Reconstruction in relative clauses and the copy theory of traces*

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 5-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Cecchetto
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Variable Binding ◽  
Current Formulation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Copy Theory ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Condition C ◽  
The One

In this paper, after discussing the status of the copy theory of traces in the current formulation of the minimalist program and the evidence for the “No-Tampering” Condition from which the copy theory of traces follows, I focus on a specific case study, namely reconstruction effects concerning the head of a relative clause. The common wisdom in the literature is that reconstruction of the relative clause head can be observed by using variable binding as a diagnostic, while the diagnostic based on Condition C gives opposite results. This split has led some researchers to propose that relative clauses are structurally ambiguous, because they would receive both a raising analysis (which explains variable binding reconstruction) and a non-raising analysis (which explains the absence of Condition C reconstruction). One of the goals of this paper is showing that it is not necessary to postulate that relative clauses are structurally ambiguous. In order to do that, I first show that the description in the literature is partly inaccurate. If some methodological problems raised by the use of transitive nouns are avoided, it can be shown that variable binding reconstruction occurs only when the relative clause modifies the subject of an equative sentence. This suggests that variable binding reconstruction of the relative clause head is not an ordinary case of reconstruction like the one found in canonicalwhchains but should be treated as a case of indirect binding, which is known to be sensitive to the identificational (as opposed to predicational) character of the sentence. I then show that, if this perspective is taken, the absence of Condition C effects can be explained without positing a structural ambiguity. The final result of the investigation is that, despite the initially puzzling evidence, the copy theory of traces can successfully explain the reconstruction pattern of the relative clause head.

scholarly journals Split-antecedent relative clauses and the symmetry of predicates

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 253-270
Author(s):  
Claudia Poschmann ◽  
Sascha Bargmann ◽  
Christopher Götze ◽  
Anke Holler ◽  
Manfred Sailer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Coordinate Structure ◽  
Transitive Verb ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Grammatical Functions

This paper presents the results of two experiments in German testing the acceptabilityof (non-)restrictive relative clauses (NRCs/RRCs) with split antecedents (SpAs). Accordingto Moltmann (1992), SpAs are only grammatical if their parts occur within the conjuncts ofa coordinate structure and if they have identical grammatical functions. Non-conjoined SpAsthat form the subject and the object of a transitive verb are predicted to be ungrammatical. Ourstudy shows that the acceptability of such examples improves significantly if the predicate thatrelates the parts of the SpA is symmetric. Moreover, it suggests that NRCs and RRCs behavedifferently in these cases with respect to the SpA-construal. We can make sense of this observationif we follow Winter (2016) in assuming that transitive symmetric predicates have to beanalyzed as unary collective predicates and thus provide a collective antecedent for the RC atthe semantic (not the syntactic) level. As we will argue, this accounts for some of the disagreementwe found in the literature and gives us new insights into both the semantics of symmetricpredicates and the semantics of NRCs.Keywords: non-restrictive relative clause, restrictive relative clause, symmetric predicate, splitantecedent.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document