Relative Clause Constructions Research Articles

From possessive to relative clause marker: a grammaticalization pathway in the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages

AbstractTypological studies have repeatedly expressed doubt about the possibility of relative clause markers grammaticalizing from possessive markers. At the same time, cross-linguistic studies of attribution have provided substantial evidence for markers of adjectival attribution deriving from possessive markers. Given that simple adjectival attributive constructions are accepted to expand readily into relative clause constructions, there is an apparent discordance in the typological literature on the diachronic sources of their markers. Using data from the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages of south-eastern Wallacea, the present article argues that the link between possessive and relative clause markers, by way of an adjectival attributive marker, should also be uncontroversial.

Priming Center-Embedded Object and Extraposed Subject Relative Clauses in Persian Language Production: Searching for Persistence of Hierarchical Configuration.

Substantial evidence suggests that priming can co-occur at different syntactic and nonsyntactic levels. In this study, we further explore two loci of priming concerned with hierarchical configuration and thematic information using relative clause (RC) constructions. In a comprehension-to-production task, Persian speakers (42 adults and 42 children) described pictures after hearing extraposed subject or center-embedded object RCs containing the same or different verbs. We ask whether priming the object RC mitigates the computational cost of center-embedding and thus increases the subsequent production of this infrequent structure. We also measured persistence effects associated with the assignment of emphasis to thematic roles, examining whether a particular portrayal of an event is captured and reproduced (e.g., foregrounding the patient). Although this study could not establish any significant priming effects in the production of the center-embedded object RC, we observed that adults used this construction more in the same verbs condition. The overall results instead revealed strong evidence for thematic emphasis persistence, such that patient-emphasis object relatives further elicited functionally equivalent RC constructions. We discuss priming of hierarchical configuration as a candidate locus and explain the activation of functional information from the speaker's perspective.

Emergence of a subordinate construction in a sign language: Intonation ploughs the field for morphosyntax

A central question in historical linguistics is how subordination emerges. Many linguists have hypothesized that diachronically subordinate constructions start off with intonational signals, and that these precede morphosyntactic markers of subordination (Givón 2012; Mithun 2009 inter alia). Contemporary spoken languages cannot provide a testing ground for this hypothesis because all of them have fully grammaticalized subordinate constructions. However, a young sign language, such as Israeli Sign Language (ISL), is perfectly suited for this purpose (Meir and Sandler 2008). In ISL, relative clauses are usually marked by squinted eyes and a forward head position, which have been shown to perform the functions of intonation (Sandler 1999; Dachkovsky, Healy and Sandler 2013), as well as by a manual demonstrative form appearing at the relative clause boundary.Yet, consistent marking of relative clauses in the language is characteristic of the younger signers’ but not of the older signers’ language. This suggests that relative clause marking developed over time in the language, which leads us to ask how it emerged and developed. The present study tracks the emergence of the relative clause (RC) construction by investigating changes in intonational and morphosyntactic signals across three generations of ISL signers. The study demonstrates that these signals begin as pragmatic or, more specifically, as information structuring devices, and are transformed by a grammaticalization process into RC markers. Furthermore, we show that intonational cues in the newly emerging RCs pave the way for a morphosyntactic marker.

Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction

Abstract This article aims to analyze the Korean internally headed relative clause (IHRC) construction from a Cognitive Grammar perspective. The primary issue concerning the Korean IHRC construction is the mismatch between the syntactic object and the semantic head. While the whole embedded clause headed by kes functions as a grammatical object, the semantic head may acquire the object status. I demonstrate that the mismatch is nothing but a metonymic process, just like the mismatch we observe in the loon in the water; even when only the loon’s feet are in the water, the expression is felicitously understood without identifying the particular portion of the loon under water. Just like the speaker accesses the loon’s feet through the loon, she accesses the semantic head through the reified embedded clause in the IHRC construction. I show that adopting this general human cognitive process helps us reach a broader generalization and sheds new light on hitherto neglected examples.

‘Something that’s very American’: The interactional role of Light-Head Relative Clauses

In this paper, we examine a specific type of Relative Clause (RC). We look at the construction consisting of a ‘light noun’, that is, a noun with highly non-specific lexical content which does not do referential work, plus a relative clause. It has generally been assumed that the functional contribution of RCs is to narrow the set of referents of the head noun to only those for which the predicate of the RC holds true. However, the ‘Light Head RC construction’ (LHRC) has various interactional affordances that mostly revolve around characterizing referents with discourse-relevant properties rather than establishing reference. We argue that these various functions of LHRCs revolve around participants’ orientations to categoryhood. Data are in English and Dutch.

Challenges in the research of relative clause constructions in signed languages to date

Challenges in the research of relative clause constructions in signed languages to date

Relative Clauses in Minangkabau, Indonesian, English Languages (Typology Study)

Minangkabau and Indonesian languages are an Austronesian. In this study, it was focused on the typology study of three different languages, namely: Minangkabau, Indonesian, and English relative clauses. It aimed to find out the differences and the similarities of relative clauses among the three languages. This paper also outlines the Accessibility Hierarchy approach to the facts that describe building on relative clause construction. The data was taken from some conversations with Minangkabaunese friends and feedback from the writer as a native speaker of the language in the analysis as well as taking the findings of recent typological and theoretical studies of Austronesian languages into consideration. From the analysis, it is found that Minangkabau and Indonesian languages are same contsruction and the english is different between Minangkabau and Indonesian languages. In the English, it is also possible to have object focus which called object fronting.

The Bantu relative agreement cycle

AbstractThis article presents theBantu relative agreement(BRA) cycle, a scenario of recurrent morphosyntactic change that involves the emergence of relativizers, which are subsequently integrated into the relative verb form, where they can ultimately replace the original subject agreement prefix. All logical outcomes at every stage of the cycle are amply attested in the languages of the Bantu family. The BRA cycle makes sense of many of the puzzling characteristics of relative clause constructions in the Bantu languages, especially in the domain of agreement.

Pronoun processing in post-stroke aphasia: A meta-analytic review of individual data

Pronouns constitute a heterogeneous class of linguistic elements, allowing for expression of referential relationships. Pronouns have an important place in daily communication which speakers and listeners rely heavily on for. Aphasia literature has evidenced that pronoun processing is impaired in people with aphasia (PWA), although explanations underpinning pronoun impairments are mixed. To address this, through a systematic literature review, we identified 42 studies which examined pronoun processing (both production and comprehension) in 474 PWA across 16 different languages. An initial meta-analysis was conducted on the overall data with all PWA and pronoun conditions with an outcome measure indicating whether or not pronoun processing is individually impaired in PWA. Further meta-analytic models were built to compare certain conditions of particular interest (e.g. reflexives vs object pronouns, object vs subject wh -pronouns) in an attempt to further disentangle the explanations behind their difficulty in use. Outputs from our meta-analysis suggest that: (i) a form of pronoun impairment is consistently present in aphasia regardless of aphasia type, fluency or language spoken; (ii) pronoun variables show selectivity in their impairment, for instance, reflexives are better preserved over object pronouns, and the subject-advantage in who-pronouns is language-selective; and (iii) other important linguistic variables that largely predict pronoun impairments include aspects like argument position of subject/object phrases, case marking, cliticization, and the presence of relative clause constructions. These outputs are discussed in relation to neurolinguistic hypotheses that predict pronoun impairments in aphasia. • This meta-analytic review compiled 474 people with aphasia across 16 different languages. • Pronoun difficulty persists across languages and pronominal variables. • Reflexives are better preserved than object pronouns. • Subject-advantage in who -pronouns is language-specific. • Subject/object position and case marking affect pronoun processing in aphasia.

Turkish tertiary level EFL learners’ recognition of relative clauses

This research study investigated Turkish Tertiary Level EFL learners’ recognition level of relative clauses. The study also examined the difficulty level of types of relative clause constructions for Turkish EFL learners and the effect of instruction on the learners’ acquisition of English relative clauses. The data were gathered from two different tests (a pre-test and a post-test) given to 30 philology students studying at the Preparatory School at Hacettepe University. The data obtained from the pretest indicated that the participants needed remedial teaching; therefore, relative clauses were taught to students through six-hour form-focused class instruction. Two weeks later, the post-test was administered to the participants to assess the effectiveness of instruction on students’ identification level of relative clauses. The data collected from the tests were analyzed quantitatively using SPSS. Findings showed that although most of the participants are good at identifying relative clauses, it is noteworthy that their recognition level of relative clauses changed significantly according to the various types of relative clause constructions. In addition, the results showed that the explicit instruction facilitated the acquisition of relative clauses to a great extent. Results of this study may provide English instructors and EFL curriculum designers with relevant information about teaching and learning of English relativization, and emphasizes the necessity of form-focused instruction.

Noun modifiers and the n preposition in Siwi Berber (Egypt)

AbstractThe three most common strategies used to modify a head noun, namely through a possessive, an adjective and a relative clause construction feature in Siwi the use of the prepositionn. Its presence is obligatory in the possessive constructions, but only present before an adjective or a relative clause in some contexts, depending on the level of restriction that the speaker wants to place on the head noun. The aim of the article is to describe the use and function ofnin all three contexts of noun modification in Siwi and present supplementary data that helps the understanding of the global function of this preposition.

영어 관계절 구문의 사용에 관한 연구 -미국 미디어와 싱가포르 미디어 코퍼스를 중심으로-

영어 관계절 구문의 사용에 관한 연구 -미국 미디어와 싱가포르 미디어 코퍼스를 중심으로-

Japanese embedded questions are nominal: Evidence from quantificational variability effect

AbstractThe exhaustivity of an embedded interrogative sentence can be altered by the presence of an adverb in the matrix clause. This phenomenon, known as Quantificational Variability Effect (QVE), manifests itself in a peculiar way in Japanese. A QVE-inducing adverb can take the form of a numeral classifier that agrees with the embedded Wh-phrase. While a QVE-inducing numeral classifier appears to be associated with an embedded wh-phrase, it is not clear how such an association can be established. I argue that Japanese embedded questions are implicitly nominalized in the fashion similar to the internally-headed relative clause construction, and that the nominalized embedded questions are treated as concealed questions. The proposed analysis gives a very simple account for the puzzling QVE construction, as the floated quantifier structure with a concealed-question-denoting NP is commonplace. The paper examines a variety of phenomena, such as doubly headed relative clause structure and selectional restrictions on QVE, which support the nominal structure of Japanese embedded questions.

내핵 관계절 구성과 분열문의 ‘것’의 통사론

내핵 관계절 구성과 분열문의 ‘것’의 통사론

The Syntax and Semantics of Relative Clauses in Kusaal

This paper looks at the syntax and semantics of relative clause constructions in Kusaal, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Although extensive work has been done on sister Mabia languages on this topic, little can be said of same in relation to Kusaal. This paper presents a comprehensive discussion on the various elements, functions, and formations of Kusaal relative clauses and, among other things, shows that the language has both in-situ internally-headed relative clauses and left-headed internally-headed relative clauses (Hiraiwa et al. 2017). This is carried out with data collected on fieldwork, in addition to the author’s own native speaker intuitions.

The syntax of relative clause constructions in Runyankore-Rukiga: A typological perspective

This paper discusses the morphosyntactic properties of relative clause constructions in the Runyankore-Rukiga language cluster (Bantu, JE13/14, Uganda). Relative clauses in this paper are categorized into nominal and clausal relatives on the basis of their exhibited morphosyntactic properties. The nominal relative clause category comprises elements which have been previously regarded as adjectives (Morris and Kirwan 1972; Taylor 1985) which include some color terms among other lexical items. The second category, namely clausal relatives, is subcategorized into subject and object clausal relatives. The subject clausal relative is realized within the subject nominal prefix by differential tone marking while the object clausal relative is an obligatory agreement-bearing complementizer which stands alone in agreement with the object antecedent. This paper describes the properties and use of the object relative marker as it has previously been regarded as a demonstrative or a pronoun. The paper offers an alternative position to the status of the object relative clause marker, proposing that it is not a pronoun equivalent to the English Wh-relative pronoun, and that it is not a demonstrative per se, but rather an agreement-bearing complementizer that heads a CP. The paper further asserts that the augment is not a relative clause marker as it is stated in Morris and Kirwan (1972) and Taylor (1985) but expresses a restrictive relative clause when present. As part of syntax, the paper discusses agreement properties in relative clause constructions and reports that a clausal relative takes the agreement of the head of the relative clause, but this is not always the case since anti-agreement cases are reported. Data for the analysis comes from authentic written materials and elicited constructions.

How much is English relativization constrained pragmatically?

A number of recent experimental works on the nature of island effects have focused on the role of syntactic and processing factors, but little attention has been paid to pragmatic factors. The main purpose of this paper is to test the role of a pragmatic constraint, called the Characterization Constraint (CC), in English relativization. Based on an acceptability judgment task conducted on two types of relative clause constructions (RCCs), it is claimed that CC plays a significant role in constraining relativization in English. In addition, the paper further discusses two interesting issues: (1) difference between the two types of tested RCCs in terms of acceptability and (2) difference between Korean and English with respect to the degree of influence of CC in relativization.

Four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children’s online comprehension of relative clauses

A core question in language acquisition is whether children’s syntactic processing is experience-dependent and language-specific, or whether it is governed by abstract, universal syntactic machinery. We address this question by presenting corpus and on-line processing dat a from children learning Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been important in debates about the universality of parsing processes. The corpus data revealed that two different relative clause constructions in Mandarin are differentially used to modify syntactic subjects and objects. In the experiment, 4-year-old children’s eye-movements were recorded as they listened to the two RC construction types (e.g., Can you pick up the pig that pushed the sheep?). A permutation analysis showed that children’s ease of comprehension was closely aligned with the distributional frequencies, suggesting syntactic processing preferences are shaped by the input experience of these constructions.

Cross-generational syntactic variation in Mundaka Basque: the influence of the language of instruction

This article examines syntactic variation in relative clause (RC) constructions in Mundaka Basque among two groups of Mundaka Basque speakers. The language of instruction the Mundaka Basque speakers had in school draws the line that separates the two populations: the first group (Mundaka Basque I) had Spanish as the language of instruction and no Basque as a subject, while the second one (Mundaka Basque II) had Standard Basque as the language of instruction and Spanish as a subject. The results of an experiment involving a cloze test show that differences in production between these populations depends on the grammaticality of RCs with an indirect object or adjunct gap and a subject or direct object RC head: for Mundaka Basque I relativization under this configuration is grammatical, while for Mundaka Basque II, it is not. This variation is due to simplification of relativization accessibility in Mundaka Basque II caused by Standard Basque.

Free relatives in Maltese

Abstract This paper makes a contribution to our understanding of free relative clauses (frcs) in Maltese, in particular so-called plain, standard or non -ever free relative clauses. We demonstrate that such frcs are interpreted as definites, consistent with the findings in much previous literature on other languages. However, we also show that Maltese has not one but two strategies for plain (realis or definite) frcs: alongside frcs formed using a wh-word we also find frcs introduced by the complementising element li, inconsistent with the seemingly widespread assumption that frcs necessarily involve a wh-word. Both strategies give rise to definite interpretations. Additionally, we argue that definite or realis wh-frcs are to be distinguished from a different (but apparently structurally identical) type, the so-called irrealis free relative clause or modal existential construction, which has not been previously identified for Maltese. We show that this subset of free relatives exhibit the properties associated with the modal existential construction crosslinguistically. We then demonstrate the existence of a subtype of headed relative clauses in Maltese which also share a number of the properties which we identify in the Maltese modal existential construction.