Typological variations of head-internal relatives in Japanese

Abstract

This paper proposes that the head-internal relative clause (HIRC) in Japanese materializes in several significantly distinct typological variants, and that these typological variations reflect different ways that syntactic and semantic mechanisms are employed to protect HIRCs from the Condition C effects that could disengage the relationship between the clause-internal lexical semantic head and whatever occurs in the external head position taking the lexical semantic head as its antecedent. Thus, with the most representative type of HIRCs in Japanese referred to in this paper as Standard HIRCs, the clause-internal semantic head is identified as referential NP, the external head as pro, and the HIRC itself as nonrestrictive relative, which as is well known is impervious to Condition C. Some other HIRC variant types in Japanese are compared with HIRCs in Yuman languages and with those in Korean to elucidate the nature of significant similarities between them in terms of the grammatical apparatus employed for the HIRC formation. The analysis of HIRCs presented here provides, it is hoped, a significantly deeper account than heretofore available of the kinds of constraints that govern the formation of HIRCs.