scholarly journals Preposition Stranding vs. Pied-Piping—The Role of Cognitive Complexity in Grammatical Variation

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Christine Günther
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Cognitive Complexity ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
Grammatical Variation ◽  
Preposition Stranding ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Processing Effort ◽  
The Right

Grammatical variation has often been said to be determined by cognitive complexity. Whenever they have the choice between two variants, speakers will use that form that is associated with less processing effort on the hearer’s side. The majority of studies putting forth this or similar analyses of grammatical variation are based on corpus data. Analyzing preposition stranding vs. pied-piping in English, this paper sets out to put the processing-based hypotheses to the test. It focuses on discontinuous prepositional phrases as opposed to their continuous counterparts in an online and an offline experiment. While pied-piping, the variant with a continuous PP, facilitates reading at the wh-element in restrictive relative clauses, a stranded preposition facilitates reading at the right boundary of the relative clause. Stranding is the preferred option in the same contexts. The heterogenous results underline the need for research on grammatical variation from various perspectives.

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.

scholarly journals Headless Relative Clauses in Pesh

2021 ◽  
pp. 509-546
Author(s):  
Claudine Chamoreau
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Relative Pronoun ◽  
Left Edge ◽  
Free Relatives ◽  
Case Marker ◽  
Free Relative ◽  
The Right ◽  
Almost All

The aim of this study is to describe the two main kinds of headless relative clauses that are attested in Pesh, a Chibchan language spoken in Honduras: free relative clauses, which use a wh-word that functions as a relative pronoun at their left edge and a subordinator at their right edge, and headless relative clauses, which lack a wh- word but show a case marker or the topic marker at the right edge of the clause. The first type is less frequently attested in the natural corpus this study relies on, although the corpus does contain various instances of maximal, existential, and free-choice free relative clauses. Each of the constructions is distinguished by features of the wh-word and/or by certain restrictions regarding the tense of the verb in headless relative clauses or the type of verb in matrix clauses. The second type of headless relative clause, the ones that do not use a wh-expression, are much more frequent in the corpus and behave like headed relative clauses that lack a wh-expression. They are like noun phrases marked by a phrase-final case marker or the topic maker. The case or topic markers are used for light-headed relative clauses and for almost all types of maximal headless relative clause that have neither a light head nor a wh-expression, in contrast to maximal free relatives, in which only locative wh-words occur.

On amharic Relative Clauses

1972 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hailu Fulass
Keyword(s):  
Surface Structure ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Relative Pronoun ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
The Right

In what follows I would like to discuss the structure of Amharic relative clauses. In the course of the discussion, I would like to make the following three claims which I will attempt to substantiate in turn. First, I believe that relativization is a kind of pronominalization and, consequently, the particle yä- that is attached to the main verb (or its auxiliary) of the relative clause is not a relative pronoun. Second, I maintain that the ‘yä- clause’ in subject position in Amharic cleft sentences is also a relative clause with an unspecified element as its head. My third claim is that Amharic genitive phrases originate from relative clauses and that the noun (phrase) in the genitive phrase to which the particle yä- is attached in surface structure is governed by a preposition in underlying structure, and the head of a genitive phrase is the head of the under-lying relative clause. In this connexion, I also argue that there is a rule in Amharic which moves the particle yä- (to the right) over, at least, one constituent.

The Relevance of the principle of Relevance for Word Order Variation in Complex Referring Expressions in Mandarin Chinese

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang Chen ◽  
Tao Ming ◽  
Xiangyu Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Discourse Function ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
Usage Patterns ◽  
Corpus Data

AbstractWord order variation in Mandarin Chinese results in two constructions consisting of a noun phrase (NP), a cluster of a demonstrative and a classifier (DM), and a relative clause (RC): the OMN with the RC+DM+NP order and the IMN with DM+RC+NP order. This study used corpus data to show correlational patterns of constructional choices. Specifically, OMN is associated with new and inanimate NPs serving the grammatical role of object in the relative clause that serves the discourse function of identification. By contrast, for IMN, the head NP tends to carry given information, tends to be an animate entity, tends to serve the grammatical role of subject in the relative clause, and tends to have an RC that serves the discourse function of characterization. We suggest that the usage patterns can be interpreted in terms of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995).

scholarly journals Absence of Evidence for Underspecification in Prenominal Relative Clause Attachment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavel Logacev ◽  
Ozgur Aydin ◽  
Müge Aylin Tuncer
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Ambiguity Advantage ◽  
Absence Of Evidence ◽  
The Right ◽  
Relative Clause Attachment

Traxler et al. (1998) have found that relative clauses with ambiguous attachment are sometimes read faster than their unambiguous counterparts. Two broad classes of theories account for this phenomenon: Race-based models posit that ambiguous sentences are read faster due to a ‘race’ between several permissible analyses of the sentence. In contrast, the strategic underspecification account maintains that, under the right conditions, readers underspecify ambiguities in order to save time. We show the two accounts make qualitatively different predictions for structures with prenominal relative clauses, such as in Turkish. While the underspecification account predicts an ambiguity in Turkish, race-based accounts predict the absence of such an effect. We present data from two reading experiments in Turkish in which we find no evidence for an ambiguity advantage in the processing of ambiguous sentences with prenominal relative clauses and argue that this finding poses a major challenge for the strategic underspecification account.

scholarly journals Superlative QP “Hyper-Raising” in dialectal Spanish: the role of dormant Edge Features

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-67
Author(s):  
Luis Ángel Sáez del Álamo
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Quantifier Raising ◽  
Edge Features ◽  
The One ◽  
Edge Feature ◽  
Spanish Dialects

In this paper I deal with a particular relative-clause superlative construction attested in Spanish dialects like Canariense (Bosque & Brucart 1991) and Puerto Rican (Rohena-Madrazo 2007), among others. In this construction the superlative quantifier raises to the left of the complementizer of the relative clause. However, as observed by Bosque & Brucart (1991), only object quantifiers can move in this way; subject quantifiers cannot. I account for this assymmetry by assuming Bianchi’s (2000) raising analysis for relative clauses, Kandybowicz’s (2009) theory on edge features and Pesetsky & Torrego’s (2001) proposal on Tense-to-Comp movement (among other assumptions). Object-quantifier movement correlates with Tense-to- Comp movement, which activates an edge feature for objects and allows them to escape the phasal minimal domain undergoing Transfer. This is not possible for subject-quantifier movement. I also propose that the determiner introducing a relative clause bears an uninterpretable [Superlative] feature with clitic-like properties. This feature forces the determiner to post-syntactically cliticize to the superlative quantifier degree word, a process which requires linear adjacency. This accounts for certain restrictions on this sort of superlative quantifier raising already pointed out by Bosque & Brucart (1991) The proposal (similar to the one in Rohena-Madrazo 2007) that [Superlative] may also be in Force in these dialects (if selected for Force by the determiner) explains a more restrictive (and widespread) variant of this construction.  

Extraposition of restrictive relative clauses

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Cardoso
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
European Portuguese ◽  
Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽  
Restrictive Relatives ◽  
Definiteness Effect

Chapter 3 deals with the extraposition of restrictive relative clauses. It demonstrates that different languages and different stages of the same language may differ with respect to the three main properties of extraposition: definiteness effect; extraposition from pre-verbal positions; and extraposition from prepositional phrases. The main descriptive findings are: (1) that earlier stages of Portuguese contrast sharply with Contemporary European Portuguese with respect to the extraposition of restrictive relative clauses; and (2) the extraposition of restrictive relatives in earlier stages of Portuguese is, to a large extent, Germanic-like, unlike Contemporary European Portuguese. From a theoretical point of view, it is argued that the same structural analysis cannot alone derive the contrasting properties of restrictive relative clause extraposition. To account for the variation found in the diachronic and cross-linguistic dimensions, it is claimed that the extraposition of restrictive relatives might involve two different structures: specifying coordination plus ellipsis and VP-internal stranding.

A corpus-based validation study of the universal processing hypothesis in English relative clause formation

2005 ◽  
Vol 149-150 ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Akihiro Ito ◽  
Junko Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Validation Study ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Valid Predictor ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
National Corpus ◽  
English Relative Clauses

The present study focuses on spoken and written data in the British National Corpus (BNC). Based on a review of recent studies on English relative clauses, we formulated a Universal Processing Hypothesis (OS >OO>SS> SO) as target hypothesis to be validated using a corpus data approach. A computer program was designed to calculate the frequency of appearance of the four types of relative clauses (OS, OO, SS, and SO). The results indicated this hypothesis to be a valid predictor of frequency of appearance of relative clauses in the domain for written corpus texts. However, it is not supported in context-governed spoken material. Limitations of the present investigation and the direction of future research are also discussed.

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