Types Of Relative Clauses Research Articles

A corpus-linguistic study of multiple relative clauses in Chinese

Abstract This study investigates the ordering restriction of two relative clauses modifying the same head noun phrase in Chinese. We use both retrospective and corpus data to challenge Larson and Takahashi's (2007) account of the ordering of such multiple relative clauses in Chinese in terms of the distinction of individual-level and stage-level relative clauses. Instead, we offer an account based on the discourse function of the multiple relative clauses in Chinese. Specifically, we argue that relative clauses that serve to provide grounding information for the head noun tend to precede other types of relative clauses. The proposed ordering restriction is shown to account for the ordering of multiple relative clauses in both Chinese and English.

Relativsätze in den Dialekten des Deutschen: Vergleich und Typologie

This paper establishes a cross-dialectal typology of relative clauses in various German dialects and Yiddish according to their form and function. A great variety of different types of relativizers and relative clauses can be observed, including various pronouns, particles, and zero relatives. Combinations of these types occur, one of the most typical involving a resumptive element in a clause introduced by a particle. The Accessibility Hierarchy, a concept developed in typology, is used with great profit for this study. It turns out that for the German relativization system, a basic opposition between subject and direct object as opposed to oblique holds in virtually every variety, whereas the indirect object is much less stable. In the varieties observed, significantly more relative particles and resumptive elements occur as compared to Standard German, which turns out to be quite atypical.

Descriptive relative clauses in Austro-Bavarian German

AbstractThis article discusses the syntactic and semantic properties of descriptive relative clauses, a type of relative clause discussed in the literature on Chinese. It is argued that descriptive relative clauses are found in the dialect of Upper Austria, a version of Bavarian German. In particular this dialect has a set of reduced definite articles that are used for discourse referents that are intrinsically uniquely identifiable, as a matter of world knowledge. As such, they cannot be restricted by a relative clause, where restriction is taken to exclude alternatives. Such DPs can, however, be modified by descriptive relative clauses. I propose that descriptive relative clauses attach to NP while restrictive relative clauses attach tonP. Thus, the article contributes to determining whether there are different relative clauses associated with different layers of projections in the nominal domain.

The comprehension of sentences derived by syntactic movement in Palestinian Arabic speakers with hearing impairment

ABSTRACTSentence and text comprehension is known to be difficult for orally trained individuals with hearing impairment. This study explored the comprehension of several syntactic structures that are especially difficult for these individuals and may lead them to experience considerable comprehension difficulties. Ten structures derived bywh-movement were tested, some of them for the first time in hearing impairment research: five types of relative clauses, three types ofwh-questions, and two types of topicalized structures, compared with two types of simple sentences. Experiment 1 tested subject and object relatives using a sentence–picture matching task. Experiment 2 tested subject questions and object questions using a picture selection task. Experiment 3 tested subject and object relatives using comprehension questions. Experiment 4 tested subject and object relatives and topicalized sentences using a reading and paraphrasing task. The participants were 24 orally trained Palestinian Arabic speaking individuals, 21 of them had mild to profound binaural hearing loss, and 3 had monaural hearing loss. The participants with binaural hearing impairment, who were not sufficiently exposed to language input during the first year of life, failed to understand object relatives, object questions, and topicalization in subject–verb and verb–subject orders in both Palestinian Arabic and Standard Arabic. In some tasks, they even had difficulty understanding subject relatives and subject questions. The monaurally hearing impaired performed similarly to the controls on all tasks.

Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses.

Surprisal, the PDC, and the primary locus of processing difficulty in relative clauses.

An Investigation of the Learnability of Relative Clauses by EFL Learners

Relative clauses as complex syntactic structures in human languages have attracted the attention of a lot of second language acquisition researchers. They are difficult for learners to produce, comprehend and imitate. The present study was an attempt to investigate the learnability of the English relative clauses by Persian learners. After discussing the importance of relative clauses, the role it plays in language acquisition, the hypotheses were proposed and investigated. The findings show that the acquisition or frequency rank order of four types of relative clauses was OS > OO > SS > SO, and that OS and OO relative clause types would be easier to acquire than SS and SO types.

Cross-linguistic differences and similarities in the acquisition of relative clauses: Evidence from Greek and Italian

This study addresses the question of how the cross-linguistic differences between Greek and Italian impact the comprehension of relative clauses by typically developing children. Specifically, we tested the effect of overt morphological case marking on the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses by children in Greek and in Italian in a crosslinguistic perspective. We did this by carrying out two comprehension experiments. In the first, we compared the comprehension of relative clauses in Greek and Italian. To obtain comparable data, we neutralized case marking in Greek DPs, and we achieved the distinction between subject and object relatives through number agreement on the embedded verb in both languages. In the second experiment, performed only with Greek children, we employed overt case marking on DPs. The results indicate that in the absence of morphological cues the Greek children performed like the Italian ones; the effect of overt case marking contributed significantly to the increase of the Greek children's performance on object relatives. We propose an account in terms of intervention on the dependency between the relative head and its copy (as in Friedmann et al., 2009), and of intervention on the AGREE relation between the agreement node and the subject in the thematic position. This double violation is responsible for the different acquisition path of different types of object relative clauses.

Processing Relative Clauses in Supportive Contexts

Results from two self-paced reading experiments in English are reported in which subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs, respectively) were presented in contexts that support both types of relative clauses (RCs). Object-extracted versions were read more slowly than subject-extracted versions across both experiments. These results are not consistent with a decay-based working memory account of dependency formation where the amount of decay is a function of the number of new discourse referents that intervene between the dependents (Gibson, 1998; Warren & Gibson, 2002). Rather, these results support interference-based accounts and decay-based accounts where the amount of decay depends on the number of words or on the type of noun phrases that intervene between the dependents. In Experiment 2, presentation in supportive contexts was directly contrasted with presentation in null contexts. Whereas in the null context the extraction effect was only observed during the RC region, in a supportive context the extraction effect was numerically larger and persisted into the following region, thus showing that extraction effects are enhanced in supportive contexts. A sentence completion study demonstrated that the rate of SRCs versus ORCs was similar across null and supportive contexts (with most completions being subject-extractions), ruling out the possibility that an enhanced extraction effect in supportive contexts is due to ORCs being less expected in such contexts. However, the content of the RCs differed between contexts in the completions, such that the RCs produced in supportive contexts were more constrained, reflecting the lexical and semantic content of the preceding context. This effect, which we discuss in terms of expectations/lexico-syntactic priming, suggests that the enhancement of the extraction effect in supportive contexts is due to the facilitation of the subject-extracted condition.

Structure sharing—The case of free relatives in Serbian

The puzzling syntax of free relative clauses (FRs) has been the subject of substantive linguistic work. The core issue, which has divided the field, has been to determine whether this type of relative clause is a complex DP whose head is a wh-pronoun or a wh-clause without the overt external head. Lately, some theoretical reconsiderations of the nature of phrase structuring or, more precisely, of the nature of the syntactic operation Merge allowed for a fresh start in this matter. In this paper, I will follow the proposal put forward by Riemsdijk (2006b) that FRs are structurally ambiguous and that they are derived through grafting, a special type of Merge. As the relevant data in Serbian show, this—still unorthodox, though theoretically legitimate—move is also empirically sound. It also provides us with a new insight into another related phenomenon in this language—the optionality of clitic placement in FRs. The analysis will also reinterpret the status of the particle god typically occurring in this type of clauses, showing why it could be viewed as a complementizer.

EFL Korean Learners’ Use of Relative Clauses in Both Context-free and Context-rich Situations

The aim of this paper was to examine the knowledge of Korean students about English relative clauses in both contextualized and decontextualized situations. To this end, a study was conducted in which fifty college students of EFL participated as subjects, and data were collected by means of three methods: elicited imitation task, composition and conversation. The findings of the study indicated that subjects’ performance on comprehension and production tasks was affected by grammatical positions on which relativization occurs in relative clause. It was also shown that their performance was influenced by position of head noun in matrix clause that relative clause modifies. Based on the results of the study, two sets of ordering (i.e., the accuracy order of comprehension and the frequency order of production) in which a variety of types of relative clauses were understood and used in contextualized and decontextualized situations were offered to describe and explain the Korean learners’ performance on L2 relative clauses.

The syntax of prenominal relative clauses: A typological study

A typological overview is given of the syntax of prenominal relative clauses, based on a large number of languages of different families and areas and presented in a theory-neutral way. On the one hand, previous typological assumptions are tested against new data. On the other hand, the question is addressed to what extent prenominal relative clauses are ordinary or unusual, compared to other types of relative clauses, especially to postnominal ones.

Hakka Noun Phrases-A Bidirectional OT Approach on Hakka Relative Clauses

This paper discusses the structure of two types of relative clauses, restrictive and non-restrictive, and provides an OT approach grounded in Weak Bidirectional Optimization to account for the syntactic construction of both types of clauses. The paper will show that while the Hakka basic NP structure favors the head to be positioned at the right edge, it is through the OT model of constraint interaction that different ordering patterns can be generated as grammatical outputs for a given input meaning. The first part of the analysis will explain the data by proposing constraints from the production-oriented perspective, as their ranking successfully yields the correct results in a unidirectional OT model. However, in the second part of the analysis, when the data grows more complex and requires syntactic and semantic distinctions between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses, the explanatory power of a unidirectional approach turns out to be limited. We find the necessity to adopt a bidirectional model, in which a form-meaning combination can be evaluated as a pair. Moreover, the fact that this innovative OT allows a recursive version of evaluation provides the possibility to generate optimal outputs successively for the two distinctive types of relative clauses under a single constraint ranking.

Two Types of Relative Clauses in Finnish

Two Types of Relative Clauses in Finnish

Relatives with a Leftward Island in Early Modern English

I describe a type of relative clause found in 16th–19th century English. This construction, the Relative with a Leftward Island or RLI, is characterised by a cluster of unusual properties. The relative pronoun is a definite, anaphoric pronoun, apparently semantically identical to that found in regular English appositive relatives, but the syntactic structure containing that pronoun is quite distinct from that of regular relative clauses. RLIs are biclausal structures, syntactically independent of the antecedent of the relative pronoun, with the first clause left-adjoined to the second. The relative pronoun occurs at the left edge of the subordinate, left-adjoined clause. I provide a synchronic analysis of this construction, and a sketch of the diachrony of relative clauses around this time, a period in which many constructions emerged, spread to some extent, and then disappeared within a century or so, without ever becoming fully widespread. The analysis offered here touches on many areas of syntactic theory, including island pied-piping, null subjects in non-pro-drop languages, resumption, the distribution of adjoined positions, and properties of movement and binding.

Appendix: relative clause questionnaire

This questionnaire is intended as an aid to eliciting different relative clause types – restrictive, non-restrictive, free, cleft. We have taken care to include examples where the head plays a variety of grammatical functions in the relative clause (subject, object, indirect object, possessor, adjunct). We have also taken care to include examples where the relative clause is in different positions in the sentence: initial, medial and extraposed. The questionnaire is intended as a guide, only, as every language will have its own set of possibilities and complications. At the end of the questionnaire is a checklist, as well as some illustrative examples in English and Swahili of the basic relative clause types. While we had Bantu languages in mind in devising the questionnaire, we hope it could also be useful to linguists with an interest in other languages.

Relative Clauses in Thai English

This study explores characteristics and usage of relative clauses in Thai English in comparison with those in American English. Data are taken from articles published in English newspapers in Thailand and America. Relative clauses are identified and classified into types based on the features: finiteness, restrictiveness and simple/complex. The Z-test is used to evaluate the proportions of types of relative clauses between the two varieties. The findings show that relative clauses in Thai English do not have any forms distinctive from those in American English, but quantitative analysis shows that the types of relative clauses are used in distinctive proportions in the two varieties. Thai English has a significantly higher proportion of non-finite and restrictive relative clauses than American English does. It also shows a higher use of shared head-noun and three-layer complex relative clauses. This characteristic of relative clauses in Thai English reflects the process of nativization, where a variety of English is adjusted to its ecology. Since Thailand is a collectivist culture with a high-context type of communication, the types of relative clauses that correspond well with this condition are used at a higher frequency than in the native variety. This suggests a subtle kind of nativization, where distinctions from the native variety do not emerge in terms of overt forms of relative clause constructions but rather in terms of the proportions of certain types of relative clauses.

Relativization in Dàgáárè and its typological implications: Left-headed but internally-headed

This article examines in detail the syntax of relativization in Dagaare, a Mabia (Oti-Volta) language of the Gur branch in the Niger-Congo family. The main aims of our investigation are twofold. The first is to describe a cluster of typologically interesting syntactic features of relativization in Dagaare in the light of the fact that no detailed description exists in the literature. The second is to demonstrate that relative clauses in Dagaare are head-internal relative clauses (HIRCs), even though they are, on the surface, postnominal relative clauses, like those in English. Thus, they are not of the in-situ type of HIRC that is well known in the literature. We call this type of relative clause a left-headed HIRC. This type of relativization has rarely been noticed cross-linguistically in the previous literature and therefore is of considerable significance for general linguistics, linguistic typology, as well as theoretical linguistics. Evidence comes from coordination in possessor relativization and PP relativization. Our discovery shows that Universal Grammar allows left-headed HIRCs as an option in addition to the more familiar types: in-situ HIRCs and head-external relative clauses (HERCs).

L'ambiguïté dans l'emploi du relatif-interrogatif en ancien français

The paper examines some aspects of the ambiguity caused by the distance between the wh- words and the antecedent in French medieval texts (from the beginning of the 12th to the middle of the 13th century). Uncertainty can appear when the wh- word's referent or when the relative clause type (i.e. restrictive versus non-restrictive) has to be recognised. The ambiguity induced by the polysemy of the forms has also been given consideration. An attempt has been made to determine how the enunciation in praesentia, i.e. the oral or to-be-read-aloud character of the texts, affects the disjunction phenomenon-generated referential instability – from the viewpoints of both contemporary and medieval reader.

Origin and development of the Iatmul focus construction: Subordination, desubordination, resubordination

In the Papuan language Iatmul, the subordinate predicate in a cleft construction has been desubordinated; synchronically, the resulting focus construction shares biclausal and monoclausal characteristics. What sets the Iatmul case apart from similar constructions in other languages is the possibility to resubordinate the predicate. This constitutes an alternative way to complete the path from bi- to monoclausal status. Rather than continuing the ‘de-marking’ of the originally subordinate verb in the direction of main clause functions, the available marking is exploited so that the previously desubordinated verb can be used in a cross-linguistically unusual type of focus relative clause. There, focus marking is lost on the obligatorily overt subject when the latter is a lexical noun, but is maintained on pronouns. In this case, both nominal and verbal morphology are formally those of a cleft construction, but syntactically the structure is monoclausal.

Noun Phrase Accessibility and Acquisition of English Relative Clauses by Korean Learners

it has been widely accepted that the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) in Keenan and Comrie (1977, 1979) plays a significant role in the acquisition of relative clauses, the interpretations of this correlation vary. To test the role of the NPAH in Korean learners’ acquisition of English relative clauses, we conducted three experiments: a sentence combining test, a computerized reading comprehension test, and a sentence combining test checking animacy effects. Our results were consistent with the predictions made by the NPAH. In addition, contrary to the argument made by Traxler et al. (2002), we confirmed that the NPAH effects cannot be substituted with animacy effects, but are more likely correlated with the processing difficulties encountered among relative clause types. (Kyungpook National University)