Abstract
This chapter starts to look at views of syntax that go beyond phrase structure through the topic of relative clauses, a complex area surveyed in Keenan (1985). Relative clauses are subordinate clauses that modify nouns within noun phrases in the main clause above them; for example, in “The man who met him was a spy” the relative clause “who met him” modifies the noun “man” in the subject NP “the man”. The relative clause often marks the element that is related to the main clause with a relative pronoun such as “who”. Relative clauses provide a fruitful area for L2 learning research, being on the one hand linked to ‘implicational’ universals of language, on the other to constraints of language processing. Implicational universals are common factors to human languages which are established by studying as many languages as possible.
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