Light-headed relative clauses in Teramano

Abstract

Abstract We investigate an unstudied, rich component of the relative clause system in Teramano, one of the Upper Southern Italian languages. We focus on light-headed relative clauses – relative clauses that lack a full nominal head and are introduced by only a Determiner-like or pronominal “light head”. We also briefly describe headed relative clauses in Teramano since the morphosyntactic features they exhibit are relevant for the investigation of light-headed relative clauses. Last, we highlight commonalities and differences between light-headed relative clauses in Teramano and Italian. Our paper provides the first systematic in-depth description of light-headed relative clauses in an Upper Southern Italian language that we are aware of, contributes to the knowledge of Teramano, the study of light-headed relative clauses crosslinguistically, and the ongoing investigation of microvariation among Italian and Italian languages.