Relative Clause Extraposition Research Articles

A constraint-based analysis of relative clause extraposition

This paper aims to provide a constraint-based analysis of relative clause extraposition (hereafter RCE) with the help of 597 tokens from BYU-BNC and COCA. In corpus findings, indefiniteness of subject NP and passive voice are salient. The grammatical weight of relative clause is the heaviest, thus being a very likely trigger for the extraposition. Discourse-New-Old-RCE is the most frequent type, implying that discourse-old information tends to be delivered in extraposed clause. As well, the extraposition is assumed to be employed in order to maximize focus effect on main predicate. All these corpus findings are well described in the system of sign-based construction grammar which enables multiple constraints to be inherited into RCE construction through inheritance hierarchy. Head-Extra Construction leads nonlocal EXTRA feature to be percolated up to sentential node. Consequently, the extraposition comes in with the help of constraints from stative-v, decl-cl, re-cl, and hd-noun-extra-cx.

Las oraciones de relativo predicativas en español: pronombres reasuntivos y variación dialectal

AbstractPredicative or pronominal relative clauses in Spanish take a pronominal category as their head. These configurations show some grammatical traits and a geographical variation which have not yet been inquiried into. These structures, as it is argued in this paper, may host two different types of resumptive pronouns: what will be called asymmetric resumption, triggered by subject-object asymmetries; and resumption as a case-matching mechanism, available in non-matching semi-free relative clauses. As for the head of the construction, dialects of Peninsular Spanish are grouped into those which resort to the explicit pronoun and those which show a propensity to use the implicit pronominal category. The variant headed by the implicit pronoun is similar in some respects to relative clause extraposition, but some new data are brought to the fore that distinguish one construction from the other.

Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses.

This paper aims to find a correlation between Information Density (ID) and extraposition of Relative Clauses (RC) in Early New High German. Since surprisal is connected to perceiving difficulties, the impact on the working memory is lower for frequent combinations with low surprisal-values than it is for rare combinations with higher surprisal-values. To improve text comprehension, producers therefore distribute information as evenly as possible across a discourse. Extraposed RC are expected to have a higher surprisal-value than embedded RC. We intend to find evidence for this idea in RC taken from scientific texts from the 17th to 19th century. We built a corpus of tokenized, lemmatized and normalized papers about medicine from the 17th and 19th century, manually determined the RC-variants and calculated a skipgram-Language Model to compute the 2-Skip-bigram surprisal of every word of the relevant sentences. A logistic regression over the summed up surprisal values shows a significant result, which indicates a correlation between surprisal values and extraposition. So, for these periods it can be said that RC are more likely to be extraposed when they have a high total surprisal value. The influence of surprisal values also seems to be stable across time. The comparison of the analyzed language periods shows no significant change.

Why is English relative clause extraposed?: A discourse-based statistical approach

This study aims to investigate to what extent grammatical variables are related to each other in order to predict the discourse-based classification of English relative clause extraposition (RCE) construction with the help of a total 597 corpus data. In doing so, an extraposed relative pronoun is assumed to function as a cohesive device, thereby classifying RCE construction into four types according to discourse manner: Discourse-Old-Old-RCE, Discourse-Old-New-RCE, Discourse-New-Old-RCE, and Discourse-New-New-RCE. This discourse-based classification tells us which information is prevalent within an extraposed relative clause as well as a subject NP. Multinomial logistic regression is used for determining which one among the indefiniteness/definiteness of a subject NP, the predicate type (i.e., passive, presentative intransitive, and predicative complement of copula be), and/or grammatical weight (i.e., subject NP-to-extraposed RC length ratio) primarily has the inclination for each type of RCE construction. The definiteness of a subject NP, passive voice, and positive value of the length ratio are critical predictors to bring about Discourse-Old-Old-RCE and Discourse-Old-New-RCE, whereas the indefiniteness of a subject NP is a main predictor of Discourse-New-Old-RCE and Discourse-New-New- RCE. Interestingly, only Discourse-New-Old-RCE taking up the largest portion in this corpus study has a negative correlation with the length ratio. In other words, both a small number of constituents within a subject NP and heavy information within an extraposed relative clause are strongly associated with the occurrence of Discourse-New-Old-RCE. Therefore, the conclusive statement is drawn that the grammatical heaviness within a restrictive relative clause becomes a powerful trigger for the extraposition. (Chodang University)

On the limits of variation in Continental West-Germanic verb clusters: evidence from VP-stranding, extraposition and displaced morphology for the existence of clusters with 213 order

Recent work on verb clusters within Continental West-Germanic has argued in favor of restrictive theories of cluster orders that only generate a subset of the logically possible orders in three-verb clusters, explicitly ruling out the 213 order. In this context it is remarkable that Swiss German features a verb cluster-like construction with an unmarked 213 order. I will argue that this construction indeed represents a proper verb cluster and not an instance of the 3rd Construction, which also allows the 213 order. Based on new diagnostics, viz., stranding of VP3 under topicalization of the governing VP2, short relative clause extraposition and displaced zu, I will show that verb clusters and Verb Projection Raising differ from the 3rd Construction with respect to the structural position of the dependent VP: while the dependent VP is contained within the projection of the governing verb in the former, it occurs outside of the projection of the governing verb in the latter. Applying the diagnostics to the Swiss German 213 construction delivers a clear result: the construction patterns with verb clusters rather than the 3rd Construction. I conclude from this that theories of verb clusters and unmarked word order more generally must be able to generate all six logically possible orders, including the 213 order.

When relative clause extraposition is the right choice, it’s easier

abstractIn one type of Relative Clause Extraposition (RCE) in English, a subject-modifying relative clause occurs in a displaced position following the matrix VP, as in: Some options were considered that allow for more flexibility. Although RCE incurs a discontinuous dependency and is relatively infrequent in discourse, previous corpus and acceptability judgment studies have shown that speakers prefer RCE over adjacent ordering when the RC is long in relation to the VP, the subject NP is indefinite, and the main verb is passive/presentative (Francis, 2010; Francis & Michaelis, 2014; Walker, 2013). The current study is the first to relate these conditional preferences to online measures of production. For a spoken production task that required speakers to construct sentences based on visual cues, results showed that the same factors that modulate choice of structure – VP length, RC length, and definiteness of the subject NP – also modulate voice initiation time. That is, when the sentential context warrants a particular structure, that structure becomes easier to produce. Following the approach of MacDonald (2013), we explain these findings in terms of two production biases, one of which favors early placement of shorter, more accessible phrases and the other of which promotes rapid retrieval from memory of the most frequently used subtypes of a construction.

A corpus-based analysis of relative clause extraposition in Persian

In recent functional and cognitive literature different motivations are suggested to influence the relative clause extraposition, where the modifying relative clause is not adjacent to the modified head noun. Information status, grammatical weight and verb class are among such motivations. The current corpus-based study of relative clause extraposition attempts to test the prediction of these different motivations in Persian. Using logistic regression analysis, the effects of these various factors on the extraposition of relative clauses are investigated. The findings revealed that, among different influential sources, grammatical weight is the main factor influencing extraposition of relative clauses. Verb class and information status are found to be lower ranked factors, respectively. The analyses demonstrated that with a special verb class, i.e. linking verbs, which predominantly carries given information in discourse, relative clause extraposition happens more freely. The findings support Hawkins' (2004) principle of domain minimization and provide more evidence for the hypothesis that, Persian, a seemingly SOV language, behaves typologically as a VO language, in which the heavy constituents shift rightward to facilitate constituent recognition, similar to other head-initial languages.

Extraposition is disappearing

This study describes a change in which relative clause extraposition is in the process of being lost in English, Icelandic, French, and Portuguese. This current change in progress has never been observed before, probably because it is so slow that it is undetectable without the aid of multiple diachronic parsed corpora (treebanks) with time depths of over 500 years each. Building on insights from Kiparsky (1995), the study shows that the change may date as far back as the innovation of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Romance relative clauses, as these varieties differentiated from Proto-Indo-European. It also shows that the unusually slow speed of the change is due to partial specialization of the construction along the dimension of prosodic weight, following the argument made at greater length in Fruehwald & Wallenberg 2016. Finally, the change is shown to have important consequences for the syntax of extraposition, supporting the adjunction analysis of Culicover and Rochemont (1990). The article also discusses the implications of Sauerland’s (2003) analysis of English relative clauses, and while modern English data supports his analysis, the diachronic extraposition data is not yet fine-grained enough to bear on the ‘raising’ analysis of relatives in general. This is identified as an important question for further research on this change.

Relative clause extraposition and prosody in German

Whether a relative clause (RC) can be extraposed has been argued to depend both on contextual focus and on whether an RC is restrictive or appositive. However, no previous study has looked at the interaction between these two factors in restricting extraposition, despite the fact that different types of relative clauses are generally taken to differ in how they relate to focus. Furthermore, previous studies have not looked at the role of prosody in accounting for the effect of focus on extraposition, and have found contradictory results with respect to the prosodic differences between appositive and restrictive relative clauses. This paper presents the results of a production experiment on German which crosses the location of focus and the type of RC in order to explore how they interact in affecting prosody and extraposition.

Rightward movement in a comparative perspective ed. by Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker (review)

Reviewed by: Rightward movement in a comparative perspective ed. by Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker Michael S. Rochemont Rightward movement in a comparative perspective. Ed. by Gert Webelhuth, Manfred Sailer, and Heike Walker. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 200.) Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013. Pp. viii, 476. ISBN 9789027255839. $158 (Hb). Rightward movement in a comparative perspective is a useful and wide-ranging collection of papers on constructions that patently display rightward movement, though one of the major issues that arises in discussion of such cases, and no less so in this book, is whether they involve ‘movement’ at all. Indeed, when syntacticians speak of rightward movement they speak metaphorically, since even syntacticians who believe in literal movement do not believe that all nonadjacent dependent relations from the right must involve movement. In fact, at least some rightward movement configurations are generally agreed not to involve movement of a dislocated and rightward-positioned dependent phrase at all (e.g. English relative clause extraposition). It is fitting that this title appears in John Benjamins’s ‘Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today’ series, following on from Rightward movement (Beermann, LeBlanc, & van Riemsdijk 1997). The present volume’s perspective is comparative in several ways: theoretical (different frameworks), empirical (different types of data: corpus-based, experimental, reported grammaticality judgments), and crosslinguistic (different languages and language families). In addition, the chapters overall compare different motivational sources for rightward movement (processing/parsing, syntax, prosodic phonology, or some combination thereof). The book is enhanced by a comprehensive and compelling introduction by the editors that makes a contribution to the study of right-ward movement configurations in its own right. This introduction gives an overview of the analytical challenges that characterize rightward movement configurations in general and relative clause extraposition in particular, and critically surveys existing proposals, including those to be found in the papers that follow in the book. Among the descriptive and explanatory issues that arise are: (i) construal (how does the rightward-positioned dependent constituent recover those aspects of its interpretation that are dependent on a leftward-situated nonadjacent position or host?); (ii) locality/boundedness (what is the source of the varying boundedness effects that govern the relation between the rightward-positioned dependent phrase and its dependent host position, and why do these differ across constructions?); (iii) whether a uniform account of (subsets of) rightward movement configurations is at all possible; (iv) why it is just the constructions so [End Page 500] labeled that appear to involve a specifically rightward dependency relation; (v) why rightward-oriented dependency relations are mandatory in some cases and optional in others (e.g. relative clause extraposition is generally optional, whereas comparative and result clause extraposition or German verbal-complement finite clause extraposition is not); and (vi) what the division of labor is between processing, prosody, and syntax in providing for the specific properties of and motivations for rightward movement configurations of different types. The chapters in this book, including the introduction, together address all of these questions in one form or another, bringing new evidence and perspectives to bear on the issues from comparative, analytical, and psycholinguistic domains of investigation. The editors have conveniently organized the contributions into four sections: empirical, minimalist, other theoretical, and prosodic perspectives. Let us review each in turn. Part 1, ‘Empirical perspective’, begins with two papers exploring the interaction of parsing/ processing effects with syntactic constraints, indicating gradient effects of the latter that are arguably due to considerations of the former. ‘Constraints on intra- and extraposition’, by Markus Bader, Jana Häusler, and Tanja Schmid, presents a study of the acceptability of extraposition of infinitival complements, of modal and of control verbs, to the German Nachfeld: modal verbs demand extraposition of an infinitival complement, while control verbs allow more variability, often easily permitting ‘intraposition’. After careful study of the theoretical literature, and noting the relevance of verb-cluster formation in particular, the authors investigate the issues using both corpus studies and grammaticality-judgment experiments. While modal verbs participate in verbcluster formation whenever possible, control verbs vary in the ease with which they participate in this operation and are therefore more susceptible to the weight considerations that are often associated with parsing...

CPs: Copies and Compositionality

Finite clausal arguments differ from other arguments—and other CPs—in two fundamental ways: (a) they do not move leftward ( Koster 1978 , Alrenga 2005 , Takahashi 2010 , Moulton 2013 ) and (b) they may combine with nouns that do not accept arguments ( Stowell 1981 , Grimshaw 1990 ). I argue that finite clausal arguments are predicates of propositional content (type 〈e,〈s,t〉〉), following proposals in Kratzer 2006 , Moulton 2009 . They combine with nouns by Predicate Modification, explaining (b). In order to complement verbs, CPs trigger two type-driven leftward movements (CP-movement and remnant AspPfronting). I argue that the resulting configuration prevents further leftward movement of clausal arguments, explaining (a). Also derived are the right-peripheral position of CPs relative to arguments and the verbal complex in Germanic, freezing effects in the VP, extraction from and binding into CPs, and the similarities and differences among CP argument extraposition, heavy NP shift, and relative clause extraposition. More broadly, the proposal demonstrates that copies can denote restricted variables, but need not be DPs (cf. Fox 2002 , Takahashi 2010 , Johnson 2012 ).

Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency by John A. Hawkins (review)

Reviewed by: Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency by John A. Hawkins Elaine J. Francis Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency. By John A. Hawkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 271. ISBN 97980199665006. $49.95. How do performance factors influence the fixed grammatical conventions of languages? How does crosslinguistic variation in grammatical structure inform our understanding of language use? In Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency, John A. Hawkins presents new applications and refinements of the principles proposed in his earlier book Efficiency and complexity in grammars (2004), representing the latest development in a long line of research on the relationships among grammar, typology, and performance. As in his previous major works on this topic (Hawkins 1983, 1994, 2004), H argues that factors related to language use have left their mark on grammars in such a way that one can find evidence of their influence in numerous grammatical rules and crosslinguistic generalizations. In turn, he shows how linguistic evidence from grammatical rules and crosslinguistic generalizations can shed light on aspects of performance that might otherwise remain obscure. The current work applies the principles proposed in Hawkins 2004 to a wider range of empirical data and addresses a number of recent developments in language processing, syntactic theory, historical linguistics, and linguistic typology. Ch. 1 summarizes the performance grammar correspondence hypothesis (PGCH) and lays out some of its predictions. The PGCH is stated as follows: ‘Grammars have conventionalized syntactic structures in proportion to their degree of preference in performance, as evidenced by patterns of selection in corpora and by ease of processing in psycholinguistic experiments’ (3). The primary evidence for this hypothesis is found in parallels between patterns of variation in language use and patterns of variation among grammars, of which numerous examples are given throughout the book. Ch. 2 reviews the three major efficiency principles from Hawkins 2004: minimize domains (MiD), minimize forms (MiF), and maximize online processing (MaOP), and gives examples from both performance and grammar illustrating how these principles cooperate and compete with each other. One example is the distribution of gaps versus resumptive pronouns in relative clauses. Whereas gaps are favored by MiF, since there are fewer morphological forms to process, resumptive pronouns are favored by MiD, since they provide a local argument for processing lexical cooccurrences within the relative clause (24). H provides evidence both from systematic crosslinguistic variation in the distribution of gaps versus resumptive pronouns and from variation in usage for languages like Hebrew and Cantonese that allow the option of either gap or resumptive pronoun in certain positions. Both sources of data confirm the same pattern: resumptive pronouns are preferred more often in structurally more complex environments for which overall efficiency is achieved through domain minimization at the expense of form minimization. Ch. 3 situates the three major efficiency principles in the context of current findings in psycholinguistics. One current line of research develops the idea that linguistic elements are easier to process when they are more predictable within a given context (Levy 2008), and the related idea that speakers maintain, on average, a uniform information density in spontaneous speech by reducing the form of more-predictable information and elaborating the form of less-predictable information (Jaeger 2006). H’s MiF captures the same general idea, but lacks the precise metrics used to quantify predictability (or surprisal) and information density. H acknowledges the usefulness of these measures and sees them as a complement to his own proposals. Another current issue addressed in this chapter is the apparent contradiction between studies that show locality effects (i.e. a processing advantage for local dependencies as compared with nonlocal ones), and those that show antilocality effects (i.e. a processing advantage for nonlocal dependencies). H exemplifies this contrast with the case of relative clause extraposition in German and English (52–57). Konieczny’s (2000) German data showed antilocality effects in word-by-word reading, [End Page 253] in the form of shorter reading times on the verb when preceded by an object-modifying relative clause, but longer reading times on the verb when the relative clause was extraposed (55). In contrast, Francis’s (2010) English data showed locality effects in that whole-sentence reading times were faster...

Extraposition of relative clauses: Phonological solutions

The paper investigates whether extraposition of relative clauses is phonologically conditioned. It examines extraposition in focus neutral sentences, in sentences with prosodically light constituents at the right periphery as well as in sentences with variable focus structure. Since these sentences induce different prosodic structures, it is expected that certain phonological constraints are violated by the canonical word order, which could be remedied by rightward movement. It will be shown that only phonological interface constraints, which are needed for an account of phonological phrasing, are responsible for extraposition. Violations of phonological well-formedness constraints are generally avoided by recursive prosodic structures and not by rightward movement.

The processing of extraposed structures in English

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more computationally complex than projective dependencies; hence, it is of natural interest to investigate whether there are any processing costs specific to non-projective dependencies, and whether factors known to influence processing of projective dependencies also affect non-projective dependency processing. We report three self-paced reading studies, together with corpus and sentence completion studies, investigating the comprehension difficulty associated with the non-projective dependencies created by the extraposition of relative clauses in English. We find that extraposition over either verbs or prepositional phrases creates comprehension difficulty, and that this difficulty is consistent with probabilistic syntactic expectations estimated from corpora. Furthermore, we find that manipulating the expectation that a given noun will have a postmodifying relative clause can modulate and even neutralize the difficulty associated with extraposition. Our experiments rule out accounts based purely on derivational complexity and/or dependency locality in terms of linear positioning. Our results demonstrate that comprehenders maintain probabilistic syntactic expectations that persist beyond projective-dependency structures, and suggest that it may be possible to explain observed patterns of comprehension difficulty associated with extraposition entirely through probabilistic expectations.

Grammatical weight and relative clause extraposition in English

Abstract In relative clause extraposition (RCE) in English, a noun is modified by a non-adjacent RC, resulting in a discontinuous dependency, as in: Three people arrived here yesterday who were from Chicago. Although discourse focus is known to influence the choice of RCE over truth-conditionally equivalent sentences with canonical structure (Rochemont and Culicover, English focus constructions and the theory of grammar, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Takami, A functional constraint on Extraposition from NP, John Benjamins, 1999), Hawkins (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004) and Wasow (Postverbal behavior, CSLI Publications, 2002) have proposed in addition that RCE should be preferred when the relative clause is long (or ‘heavy’) relative to the VP because such structures are processed more efficiently in comprehension and production. The current study tested this hypothesis based on Hawkins' (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004) domain minimization principles. In an acceptability judgment task, canonical sentences were rated significantly higher than extraposition sentences when the RC was light, but this difference disappeared when the RC was heavy. In a self-paced reading task, extraposition sentences were read significantly faster than canonical sentences when the RC was heavy, but there was no difference when the RC was light. In an analysis of RCE in the ICE-GB corpus, extraposed RCs were significantly longer than the VP on average, whereas canonical RCs were significantly shorter, and the proportion of sentences with extraposition decreased as the ratio of VP-to-RC length increased. These findings support Hawkins' (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004) domain minimization principles and help explain why a discontinuous dependency is allowed and sometimes preferred even in a language with relatively fixed word order.

Clause structure in South Asian languages (review)

Reviewed by: Clause structure in South Asian languages Josef Bayer Clause structure in South Asian languages. Ed. by Veneeta Dayal and Anoop Mahajan. (Studies in natural language and linguistic theory 61.) Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004. Pp. 325. ISBN 1402027184. $59.95. The languages of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, the Mal-dives, and Sri Lanka) are genetically diverse. They belong either to the Indo-Aryan group (i.e. the eastern group of Indo-European), to the Dravidian group, to part of the Austro-Asiatic group, or to part of the Sino-Tibetan group of languages. Nevertheless, they show much convergence in terms of grammatical features. With respect to syntax these include head-final order of constituents, WH-in-situ, serial verb constructions, nonnominative subjects, and clause-final complementizers. Common features like these have given rise to viewing South Asia as a specific linguistic area (see Emeneau 1956, Masica 1976, 1991). While earlier research has mainly concentrated on sociolinguistic aspects of this linguistic area, it has become a focus of interest within linguistic typology and especially in the course of a revived interest in formal comparative language re-search. In their introduction to the present volume the editors emphasize the fact that it was in the 1980s and 1990s that investigations of South Asian languages began to have a critical impact on the development of grammatical theory. Starting out from an account of agreement, scope, and word order in Hindi, both editors have made important contributions in their previous work. Theories of variable word order, theories about the syntax-semantics interface, WH-scope, binding, and so forth, and theories of argument structure, predication, and Case can hardly ignore the results that have emerged from the study of South Asian languages over the years. The present volume offers a collection of ten articles that deal with various aspects of clause structure in South Asian languages. The languages under investigation are 'big' languages throughout. Hindi (or Urdu) as one of the most-studied languages is next to Bangla (also known as Bengali), Kashmiri, and Sinhala (which is heavily influ-enced by Dravidian) at the center of interest in Indo-Aryan. The Dravidian languages that play a role in individual chapters are Kannada and Malayalam. Austro-Asiatic or Sino-Tibetan languages play no role in the present collection.1 The contributions are loosely grouped in four blocks: functional projections (R. AMRITAVALLI on the develop-ment of functional categories in Kannada, GILLIAN C. RAMCHAND on negation in Ban-gla), argument structure (K. A. JAYASEELAN on serial verb constructions in Malayalam, JEFFREY LIDZ on causativity and reflexivity in Kannada, P. MADHAVAN on light verb raising and the role of an empty preposition in Malayalam), Case theory (MIRIAM BUTT and TRACY HOLLOWAY KING, as well as ALICE DAVISON on Case in Hindi-Urdu), and movement phenomena (PAUL HAGSTROM on the movement of scope-sensitive particles in Sinhala and Japanese, AYESHA KIDWAI on topic movement and questions of the extended projection principle (EPP) with special reference to Kashmiri and German, [End Page 597] JAMES D. MCCAWLEY on different types of relative clauses and relative clause extraposi-tion in Hindi). Most of the contributions are committed to the principles-and-parameters (P&P) framework as developed in Noam Chomsky's government and binding theory (GB) and continued in the minimalist program. The chapter by Butt and King is couched in lexical functional grammar (LFG). The authors argue that this framework offers advan-tages in capturing Case phenomena in Hindi-Urdu. McCawley's paper remains largely neutral but makes crucial reference to syntactic versus interpretive accounts of relative clause extraposition. The chapters by Amritavalli and by Butt and King include details about diachronic aspects. R. Amritavalli's chapter, 'Some developments in the functional architecture of the Kannada clause', takes its starting point from observations about negation in the Dravi-dian language Kannada. It concentrates on a diachronic development according to which Kannada has undergone a change in which finiteness was first expressed by agr(eement) and then turned into a projection of Mood (MoodP), thereby allowing finiteness...

Semantic Constraints on Relative Clause Extraposition

Extraposed relative clauses pose certain problems for movement-based analyses. They seem to be insensitive to island constraints, and show intricate interactions with variable binding. Starting from the assumption that complement and modifier extraposition should not be treated alike, I present an analysis of relative clause extraposition that does not rely on movement. Instead, I assume that the same syntactic and semantic constraints interact to determine the grammaticality of both extraposed and non-extraposed relative clauses. Syntactically, the proposed constraints lead to the configurational superiority of the relative clause. This superiority has its origin in the semantics of the relative clause: the relative pronoun is referentially defective and remedies this deficiency by selecting an appropriate antecedent. The present analysis draws on data from German.

Relative Clause Extraposition in German: An Efficient and Portable Implementation

In this paper, I propose an implementation of relative clause extraposition in German. The proposal builds on Kiss (Natural Language and Linguistic theory, in press) who treats relative clause extraposition as an anaphoric process by means of percolation of anchors to which the relative clause is bound. I discuss several sources of spurious ambiguity in Kiss’s original formulation and suggest a two-step percolation of anchors that crucially distinguishes right-peripheral from central or left-peripheral percolation. Since extraposition is fairly productive, and phrase-structure alternates between head initial (prepositional phrases, V-initial) and head-final structures (postpositional phrases, V-final), German provides a good testing ground for techniques controlling spurious ambiguity that may easily be ported to languages where phrase structure is more canonical and/or extraposition more restricted. Finally, the performance of the Kiss-style approach is compared to an alternative implementation in terms of rightward movement, similar to Keller (1995, Towards as Account of Extraposition in HPSG. In Proceedings of the ninth Meeting of the European ACL. Dublin).

Phrasal typology and the interaction of topicalization, wh-movement and extraposition

Ever since Chomsky's "On Wh-Movement" (Chomsky 1977) it has been assumed that topicalization and wh-question formation can be analyzed as instances of the same operation. Leaving certain features aside, this proposal carries over to the analysis of unbounded dependency constructions in HPSG since structurally, topicalization does not differ from wh-question formation in the analysis suggested in Pollard & Sag (1994: 157-163). In the present paper, we challenge this assumption and suggest an alternative analysis of unbounded dependency constructions. Here, topicalization and wh-question formation are considered as structurally different at least in certain languages. They may, however, be structurally identical in other languages. This difference is empirically reflected in patterns of relative clause extraposition. As has been pointed out by Culicover & Rochemont (1990: 28), an extraposed relative clause must not take an antecedent contained in a VP if the VP is topicalized but the relative clause is not.

Between finite state and Prolog: constraint-based automata for efficient recognition of phrases

In computational linguistics, efficient recognition of phrases is an important prerequisite for many ambitious goals, such as automated extraction of terminology, part of speech disambiguation, and automated translation. If one wants to recognize a certain well-defined set of phrases, the question of which type of computational device to use for this task arises. For sets of phrases that are not too complex, as well as for many subtasks of the recognition process, finite state methods are appropriate and favourable because of their efficiency Gross and Perrin 1989; Silberztein 1993; Tapanainen 1995. However, if very large sets of possibly complex phrases are considered where correct resolution of grammatical structure requires morphological analysis (e.g. verb argument structure, extraposition of relative clauses, etc.), then the design and implementation of an appropriate finite state automaton might turn out to be infeasible in practice due to the immense number of morphological variants to be captured.