Relative clauses

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a specific domain within the area of subordination, namely on relative constructions. Subordination is a property that characterizes all natural languages. The crucial relevance of its assessment explains the vast cross-linguistic literature in this field since the earliest studies in Generative Grammar. Assessing the existence of subordination has been even more important for sign languages, as a crucial step towards the recognition of their status as fully-fledged natural languages. The typological variation observed has been classified on the basis of two criteria. On the one hand, there is the syntactic criterion concerning the hierarchical relation between the relative clause (RC) and the main clause, the phonological realization of the head in each clause, and the syntactic category of the RC. In studies on spoken languages, various syntactic tests have been used as diagnostics to pin down the syntactic and semantic properties of RCs, thus allowing for their classification within traditional typologies of relativization.