Relative Pronouns Research Articles

Internally-headed relative clauses in sign languages

This chapter considers relative clause data from sign languages in light of their variation with respect to basic word order, nonmanual marking, and presence/absence of internally-headed and externally-headed relative clauses. Syntactically, a double merge cartographic model (Cinque 2005a; b), following Brunelli (2011), is adopted. The differences across sign languages are suggested to result from differences in raising requirements with respect to the relative clauses themselves and with respect to their heads, rather than basic word order, use of complementizers, relative pronouns, or nominalizers, or (type of) nonmanual marking. Typologically, it is noted that several of the SVO SLs have IHRCs, that at least one SOV SL does not have IHRCs, and that three of the SLs have both internally-headed (IHRCs) and externally-headed (EHRCs) relative clauses.This article is part of the special collection: Internally-headed Relative Clauses

The Comprehension of English Relative Clauses by Arabic-Speaking EFL Learners

This study investigates the extent to which 50 Arabic-speaking EFL learners comprehend English relative clauses (RCs). It also aims to test which relative pronoun among the seven pronouns we are investigating is the easiest to comprehend and which is the most problematic. Furthermore, it aims to measure whether the English proficiency level of the participants affects their performance on the test. Therefore, a multiple-choice test was administered in order to examine their comprehension of this complex syntactic structure. The participants were asked to choose the correct answer out of four choices. The results demonstrate that Arabic-speaking EFL learners may not be fully aware of English relative clauses (total percentage= 48.5%). The t-test shows that the English proficiency level affected the participants’ performance on the test. Consequently, there is a significant difference between the answers of the advanced learners (ALs) (61.3%) and those of the intermediate learners (ILs) (35.6%). Moreover, the results reveal that the easiest relative pronoun to comprehend is the pronoun when, and the most difficult one is the pronoun whom. This study accounts for these difficulties and concludes with pedagogical implications and recommendations for further research.

Relative Pronouns as Predicatives: Evidence from Shakespearean English

ABSTRACTIn his Modern English Grammar, Otto Jespersen declared that the relative pronoun who cannot be used as a predicative. He further stated that which is the correct form for the function. To support this argument, he provides evidence from texts of the middle nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To date, the use of predicative relatives before the eighteenth century has received little attention and no research on this topic has been conducted for Early Modern English. To fill this gap, this article focuses on the use of predicative relatives in Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, revealing that which had been established as the ordinary form of the predicative relative in Shakespeare’s English. Although there exists one exceptional case of using whom in Cymbeline, by collating folio and quarto texts and looking into revisions of eighteenth century adaptations, it is concluded that Jespersen’s argument applies to Early Modern English as well.

Evaluating directionality in the internal reconstruction of pre-Old Irish copular clauses

This article reconstructs the syntax of pre-Old Irish copular clauses using relic or anomalous formations within Old Irish. It is therefore an exercise in syntactic internal reconstruction. The two patterns that are reconstructed are (a) the word order of subject and predicate, which was Predicate Subject in Old Irish but is argued to have been Subject Predicate in pre-Old Irish; (b) the order of negation, the clause-typing enclitic *de, the relative pronoun and the copula which is argued to be NEG+REL+de+COP. Furthermore, It is argued that a change from a fully verbal copula *issi in pre-Old Irish to a clause-typing particle is in Old Irish is implicated in the innovation of both (a) and (b). The reconstruction is evaluated using the technique of ‘local directionality’, by examining detailed feature/phrase-structure analyses of the constructions in at least two languages and hypothesizing the most economical and plausible relation between the two.

Competition Between ‘Who’ and ‘Which’ in Slavic Light-Headed Relative Clauses

The relativization systems of most Slavic languages include relative pronouns that can be conventionally labelled as ‘who’ and ‘which’ and differ in a number of logically independent parameters (etymology, animacy, grammaticality of attributive contexts, and morphological distinction for number and gender). Prior research has shown that the choice between ‘who’ and ‘which’ in Slavic languages is largely dependent on the head type. Some of the languages allow the ‘who’ pronouns to be used with pronominal heads, but not with nouns in the head, while in others, the pronominal heads in the plural are also ungrammatical with the pronoun ‘who.’ The present study aims to complement the available qualitative data on the distribution of the relativizers with quantitative data and to propose a unified account for all the observed tendencies. A corpus-based study was conducted in order to establish language-internal statistical tendencies comparable to the known grammaticality restrictions. The results show much agreement between the qualitative and quantitative tendencies. Thus, the head ‘those,’ unlike the head ‘that,’ is incompatible with the relativizer ‘who’ in Slovak, Polish, Upper Sorbian, and Lower Sorbian languages, while the same tendency is quantitative in Czech, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and the older varieties of Russian. Corpus data suggest that there is also a stronger tendency for the relative pronoun ‘who’ to be avoided with the head ‘those’ than with the head ‘all.’ One more relevant parameter is the semantic type of the clause, maximalizing semantics being the preferred option for ‘who.’ I suggest that all these and some other tendencies can be subsumed under a macro-parameter of the extent to which the head is integrated into the relative clause.

The C system of relatives and complement clauses in the history of Slavic languages

This article scrutinizes the diachrony of relativizers and complement clause subordinators in Russian, Polish, and Czech. Historical morphology indicates a development from agreeing relative pronouns via noninflected relativizers to complement clause subordinators. This concurs with recent findings on Germanic (Axel-Tober 2017), but contradicts more traditional proposals that derive subordinators from demonstratives. The respective syntactic reanalyses are demonstrated on diachronic Slavic corpus data. Moreover, a quantitative comparison of sixteenth- to seventeenth-century East Slavic texts with and without West Slavic interference suggests that the use of kotoryj ‘which’ as a relative pronoun spread into Russian as an inner-Slavic contact-induced change.

On the Syntactic Structure of the Transparent Relative Clause

The aim of this paper is to investigate the syntactic structure of the so-called transparent relative clause. What in the standard free relative clause has been treated as a unit including a head NP and a relative pronoun together. In the case of transparent free relatives, however, a what-clause reveals some peculiar characteristics different from standard relative clauses. To explain those characteristics, many linguists have suggested several different analyses. The analyses can be categorized into three groups: Backward Deletion, Shared Structure analysis, (Rightward) Movement and Deletion analysis. Because of their drawbacks, I have suggested Leftward Movement and Deletion analysis, and adopted Winkler`s(2005) D(rivational)-Model of Grammar to explain the interactions between the PF deletion and LF interpretation.

Sentence comprehension in Slovak-speaking patients with Alzheimer's disease.

According to some studies, sentence comprehension is diminished in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, but they differ on what underlies the sentence comprehension impairment. Sentence comprehension in AD patients has been studied mainly in the English language. It is less clear how patients with AD speaking a morphologically rich language with grammatical morphemes indicating case and through it even thematic roles process reversible sentences. To compare the comprehension of various syntactic constructions in Slovak-speaking AD patients and cognitively intact elderly people. We were concerned with the influence of the following aspects on sentence comprehension: its length, the order of thematic roles and the presence of a morphological cue placed on the first noun (or at the beginning of a sentence). We used our own Slovak test of sentence comprehension based on matching pictures to spoken sentences. These sentences contain transitive verbs and two nouns (person/animal), one functioning as a subject and the other as an object, which both can perform the action expressed by the verb. We assessed 62 healthy elderly people and two groups of AD patients. The first group consisted of 34 participants with a mild degree of AD and the other group of 43 participants with a moderate degree of AD. Statistical comparisons showed that the elderly controls were significantly better in the comprehension of simple active OVS (object-verb-subject word order) sentences and complex EO sentences (a centre-embedded relative clause with a relative pronoun substituting for an object) than patients with a mild degree of AD. In patients with a moderate degree of AD, comprehension of all tested sentence types was worse than in healthy elderly people. The results also indicated that even mild AD patients have more serious problems with processing sentences with non-canonical order of thematic roles regardless of a morphological cue at the beginning of a sentence. The results point to diminished sentence comprehension in patients with AD. In the group of mild AD patients, the order of thematic roles played a significant role in their sentence comprehension. Even though the grammatical morphemes clearly code the functions of words in the Slovak language, mild AD patients do not process them in sentences with a non-canonical order of thematic roles at the same level as the healthy controls. Patients with moderate AD have significant problems even with the comprehension of sentences with a canonical order of thematic roles. These difficulties seem to be a consequence of insufficient resources for language processing.

Textlinguistic Perspective in Newspaper Editorial Texts: Al-Quds Al-‘Arabi Newspaper as a Case Study

Newspaper editorial texts are argumentative genre which occupies a prime position in the contemporary society such that policy makers are made accountable for their decisions which affect teeming mass of the people. It has been regarded as the voice of the voiceless or the silent majority of the society. This type of texts has been neglected in linguistic research for a long while, in spite of its vital roles in shaping the society. The present paper attempts an evaluation of this genre via the lenses of text linguistics which is primarily interested in the communicative bent of all forms of writings. This study adopted a qualitative descriptive analytical methodology to study the editorial genre in newspapers and a purposeful random technique was used in selecting about one hundred and fifty articles of al-Quds al-‘Arabi newspaper between September 2012 and April 2013, which center on issues of everlasting peace and stability of the middle-east region. The adopted data for the study resides in the electronic version of the newspaper. Al-Quds al-‘Arabi is a fiercely independent, political daily Arabic newspaper which is published in London since 1989 by Palestinian refugees. It is clear from the analysis that cohesion is the basic standard of text linguistics which plays significant role in the formation of the text, this is demonstrated by the presence of most elements of cohesion such as demonstrative pronouns, relative pronouns, pro-forms, references (internal & external), conjuncts, deitics, tenses and repetition in the text, whereas, there is absolutely no substitution, deletion and collocation whatsoever. In addition, other standards such as coherence, intentionality, acceptability, situationality and intertextuality also contributed to the actualization of the communicative value of this particular text.

SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF THETA ROLES OF VERBS IN THE MAH MERI LANGUAGE

The Mah Meri language, one of the severely endangered languages of Malaysia, is facing the threat of extinction. In order to save valuable information of this language, this paper focuses on one of its aspects, the Theta Roles in relation to the verbs. Using Radford’s (1997 & 2009) theory of Theta Roles, this study analyzes and explores the verb phrase of Mah Meri. The main objective of this study is to establish the Theta Roles in relation to verbs in the Mah Meri language. In order to fully understand the verb structures, the morphological entities of affixes such as prefixes and suffixes are studied. Moreover, the word order of the sentential constructions are also analyzed according to active and passive forms. These are done in tandem with analyzing the pronouns in relation to the placement of verbs in a Mah Meri sentential construction. It is found that Theta Roles are present in the data except for the Theta Role Recipient. However, this is not due to the lack of the Theta Role of Recipient in the Mah Meri language; rather it is due to the limitation of the scope in this study as data is analyzed based on the interviews only. On the other hand, the Theta Role of Agent is clearly evident in the Mah Meri language.Keywords: Mah Meri Language, Argument Structure, Theta Roles, Thematic Relations

Exclamative relatives in vocative noun phrases

Abstract This article examines the grammatical properties of the Dutch construction Kluns dat/die je bent! Specifically, it addresses the question of how exclamation is formally encoded in this construction. In line with Bennis (1998), it is proposed that exclamative force follows from an interaction between lexical properties of function words, on the one hand, and configurational structure (syntax), on the other hand. It is proposed that the dat/die-clause is a relative clause which is part of a larger vocative noun phrase containing a silent or overt 2nd person pronoun (the addressee). It is shown that the relative clause, and not the antecedent, is the locus of exclamation. The small word daar/d’r, which optionally appears in the relative clause, is analyzed as a surface manifestation (spell-out) of the LOCATION-feature (the distal property) that is associated with the relative (= distal) pronoun and the second person pronoun.

Análisis sociolingüístico del queísmo en el español hablado en Santiago de Chile

espanolEn este articulo se describe el empleo del queismo en el habla santiaguina, desde el punto de vista sociolinguistico. Para tal proposito, se analizo una muestra estratificada de entrevistas realizadas a 120 hablantes santiaguinos. Los objetivos del estudio consistieron en identificar los factores internos que propiciaban el empleo del queismo y correlacionarlo con factores sociodemograficos del hablante (sexo, edad y grupo socioeconomico). Los resultados muestran que los contextos que mas favorecen el queismo son la omision de una preposicion requerida delante de un que conjuntivo y en estructuras regidas por verbos pronominales ante un que relativo. Asimismo, los factores sociales mas sensibles en la ocurrencia del queismo fueron el grupo socioeconomico del informante y, de modo muy secundario, su sexo. De este modo, se comprobo que el queismo es mas frecuente en el grupo socioeconomico bajo de la comunidad en estudio, asi como en las mujeres del corpus analizado. EnglishIn this article, we described the use of the queismo in Santiago's speech, from a sociolinguistic point of view. For this purpose, a stratified sample of 120 interviews of Santiago's speakers was analyzed. The objectives of the study were to identify the internal factors that promoted the use of the queismo and to correlate this use with the informant's sociodemographic factors (gender, age and socioeconomic group). The results show that the contexts that promoted the queismo are the omission of a required preposition before the word que (conjunction) and que (relative pronoun) in Spanish. Also, the social factors that are mostly related to the use of queismo are firstly, the socioeconomic group of the speakers and secondly, his gender. Thus, the queismo is more commonly found in the lower classes of the community under study and in females of the analyzed corpus.

Associations between Relational Pronoun Usage and the Quality of Early Family Interactions

Our study examined the relationships of relational pronouns used in parental conversation to the quality of early family interactions, as indexed by Family Alliance (FA). We hypothesized that more positive family interactions were associated with the use of more we-pronouns (e.g., we, us, our; we-ness) and fewer I- and you-pronouns (e.g., I, me, you, your; separateness) by both mothers and fathers. Our statistical model using a multilevel modeling framework and two levels of analysis (i.e., a couple level and an individual level) was tested on 47 non-referred families (n = 31 primiparous families; child’s age, M = 15.75 months, SD = 2.73) with we-ness and separateness as outcomes and FA functions as between-dyads variables. Analyses revealed that we-ness within the parental couple was only positively associated with family affect sharing while separateness was negatively associated with different FA functions (e.g., communication mistakes). Our main finding suggested that the kinds of personal pronouns used by parental couples when discussing children’s education would be associated to the emotional quality of the family interactions.

Article selection and anaphora in the German relative clause

German definite articles are able to contract with prepositions under certain conditions. When a noun phrase is discourse anaphoric, contraction is blocked. In the current paper we present a puzzle: restrictive relative clauses require the use of the non-contracted (strong) article form, despite their apparent lack of anaphoricity; both the determiner of the head noun and the relative pronoun (which is, in most cases, syncretic with the definite article) surface with the strong form. We provide a uniform analysis of discourse anaphoric and relative clause uses that makes use of contexts, as defined in the dynamic framework of de Groote (2006). We argue that a lexical item, which we call “anaph”, whose purpose is to make reference to an individual provided by the context, intervenes between the noun and the article in the strong form. anaph makes reference to an individual provided by the global context in cases of anaphora, and to an individual provided by an updated local context in the case of relative clauses.

An Analysis of Embedded Clauses in Sidney Sheldon's NOTHING LASTS FOREVER” And Their Translation in Indonesian

This research aims at describing how the English embedded clauses lexicogrammatically realized in the HI version of the novel, to discover the interpretation of the English-BI embedded clause representations in the context of language variations of novel texts, and to count the percentage of each class of English embedded clauses with relative pronouns and their translation in BI.This research applies a descriptive method it means that the researcher only collects the data, analyzes them and draws conclusions from the analyzed data. The source of the data consists of the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Sidney Sheldon and its translation in Indonesian Tiada Yang Abadi by Hendarto Setiadi. A sample of 91 relative pronouns was established using the purposive sampling technique.The findings of the study show that 89.01% of the English embedded clauses with relative pronouns are translated into BI relative pronoun yang. There are also English embedded clauses which are translated with BI words other than yang and English embedded clauses with relative pronouns which have no equivalents in Indonesian, Their percentages are 6.59% and 4.39%.The English embedded clauses with relative pronouns which are translated into BI words other than yang are classified into 3 types. English embedded clauses with relative pronouns translated into 1)conjunction, 2)prepositionand3) other equivalent word in BI. There are also3 types of English embedded clauses with relative pronouns which have no equivalent in BI. They are 1) English relative pronouns which have no equivalent in BI, 2) English embedded clauses which have no equivalent in BI and 3) The whole sentence which has an English embedded clause in it has no equivalents in BI. The translator may also change the complexity of some sentences by changing complex sentences into compound ones, and thus made them more readable.

The Localization of Long-Distance Dependency Components: Integrating the Focal-lesion and Neuroimaging Record.

In the sentence “The captain who the sailor greeted is tall,” the connection between the relative pronoun and the object position of greeted represents a long-distance dependency (LDD), necessary for the interpretation of “the captain” as the individual being greeted. Whereas the lesion-based record shows preferential involvement of only the left inferior frontal (LIF) cortex, associated with Broca's aphasia, during real-time comprehension of LDDs, the neuroimaging record shows additional involvement of the left posterior superior temporal (LPST) and lower parietal cortices, which are associated with Wernicke's aphasia. We test the hypothesis that this localization incongruence emerges from an interaction of memory and linguistic constraints involved in the real-time implementation of these dependencies and which had not been previously isolated. Capitalizing on a long-standing psycholinguistic understanding of LDDs as the workings of an active filler, we distinguish two linguistically defined mechanisms: GAP-search, triggered by the retrieval of the relative pronoun, and GAP-completion, triggered by the retrieval of the embedded verb. Each mechanism is hypothesized to have distinct memory demands and given their distinct linguistic import, potentially distinct brain correlates. Using fMRI, we isolate the two mechanisms by analyzing their relevant sentential segments as separate events. We manipulate LDD-presence/absence and GAP-search type (direct/indirect) reflecting the absence/presence of intervening islands. Results show a direct GAP-search—LIF cortex correlation that crucially excludes the LPST cortex. Notably, indirect GAP-search recruitment is confined to supplementary-motor and lower-parietal cortex indicating that GAP presence alone is not enough to engage predictive functions in the LIF cortex. Finally, GAP-completion shows recruitment implicating the dorsal pathway including: the supplementary motor cortex, left supramarginal cortex, precuneus, and anterior/dorsal cingulate. Altogether, the results are consistent with previous findings connecting GAP-search, as we define it, to the LIF cortex. They are not consistent with an involvement of the LPST cortex in any of the two mechanisms, and therefore support the view that the LPST cortex is not crucial to LDD implementation. Finally, results support neurocognitive architectures that involve the dorsal pathway in LDD resolution and that distinguish the memory commitments of the LIF cortex as sensitive to specific language-dependent constraints beyond phrase-structure building considerations.

RELATIVE CLAUSES FROM ENGLISH TO ALBANIAN

This paper aims to describe the use of relative clauses in English and Albanian by comparing different clause types. Some theoretical issues addressed in this article include the definition of relative clauses, the relativized elements, and the use of relative pronouns and adverbs in both languages. Distinctions and similarities are identified by analyzing the way in which these clauses are translated from English into Albanian. The theoretical part is illustrated by examples extracted from “Animal Farm” by George Orwell and “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austin, and their translated versions in Albanian, “Ferma e Kafshëve” and “Krenari dhe Paragjykime”.

Coordination in Categorical Compositional Distributional Semantics

An open problem with categorical compositional distributional semantics is the representation of words that are considered semantically vacuous from a distributional perspective, such as determiners, prepositions, relative pronouns or coordinators. This paper deals with the topic of coordination between identical syntactic types, which accounts for the majority of coordination cases in language. By exploiting the compact closed structure of the underlying category and Frobenius operators canonically induced over the fixed basis of finite-dimensional vector spaces, we provide a morphism as representation of a coordinator tensor, and we show how it lifts from atomic types to compound types. Linguistic intuitions are provided, and the importance of the Frobenius operators as an addition to the compact closed setting with regard to language is discussed.

Relative Clauses and Labeling Algorithm

The goal of this paper is to show how labeling algorithm in Chomsky (2013, 2014) can explain the syntax of relative clauses. To achieve this, we will propose the following assumptions. First, we will argue that the relative clause is right-adjoined to a head N and a relative operator OP moves from the base position through [Spec, TP] to [Spec, CP]. Second, we will suggest that C transfers its φ-feature to T, stranding its wh-feature on C under the C-T inheritance system in Chomsky (2008). Third, we will assume that the relative operator carries its φ-feature and wh-feature. Our analysis of relative clauses has the advantages of accounting for the following phenomena. First, we can account for the free alternation of the relative pronoun in English. Second, we can explain anti that-trace effect in relative clauses. Third, we can explain the highest subject restriction which shows that the highest subject position in the relative clause cannot be occupied by a resumptive pronoun. Finally, we can account for the free alternation of Nez Perce relative pronouns.

Some Syntactic Features of Relative Constructions in the Greek New Testament

In the Greek New Testament, relative sentences that are introduced by relative pronouns alone, apart from the adverbial uses, are the most frequent subordinate sentence type. The research reported on in this paper aimed to investigate and describe a number of syntactic features of relative constructions in the Greek New Testament, taking account, among others, of some typological parameters that have been developed in the general linguistics literature for these constructions. The results indicate that relative constructions in the Greek New Testament have a variety of features, all of which have counterparts in some modern (or other ancient) languages, despite the differences. The relative sentence in the Greek New Testament is mostly postnominal, and the relative pronoun-type is used in those cases for encoding the role of the coreferential element in the relative sentence. Phrases expressing a variety of syntactic functions in a sentence (e.g. subject, direct object, etc.) are accessible to relativisation, that is, they can be represented by relative pronouns. Nominal elements serve mostly as antecedents of relative sentences, although sentences appear in that function as well. A variety of syntactic types of relative sentences can be distinguished, including the prenominal participial, postnominal finite/participial, circumnominal, free relative, adverbial, prejoined, postjoined, sentential and conjoined types. These can be linked in a systematic way to the four functions of relative sentences in the New Testament, i.e. identifying, appositive, adverbial and continuative. Relative sentences also play a role in communicative strategies. Prejoined relative sentences, for example, are most suitable for exposition and theme-building, especially in the correlative diptych construction. Keywords : Relative sentence, relative construction, syntax, Hellenistic Greek, New Testament