Free relatives in Maltese

Transparent Free Relatives in English

Transparent free relatives (TFRs) are constituents involving a WH-gap dependency in which the phrase that is predicated of the gap associated with what, not the wh-phrase itself, functions as the syntactic and semantic ‘nucleus.’ Previous analyses have either treated TFRs as a construction radically different from ordinary FRs, utilizing such mechanisms as parenthetical placement or grafts, or ...

Reconstruction and (Free) Relatives

Identity and Indeterminacy in -ever Free Relatives

An -ever free relative (FR) is felicitous only when the speaker doesn't know, or doesn't care about, the identity of the entity denoted. (1) is felicitous if, for example, the speaker doesn’t know if Mary is cooking pea soup or spinach (although he may know it is green). That is, the basic level nominal (in the sense of Cruse 1977) must be undetermined. When an -ever FR contains a nominal head ...

Left-peripheral Free Relatives in Northern Basque

(1) Bambara (Zribi-Hertz & Hanne 1995) Musa ye Uru min sAn, n ye o ye. Moussa PF knife REL buy 1SG PF him saw I saw the knife that Moussa bought.’ (2) Burushaski (Tiffou & Patry 1995) amenmoiNga bariN écam (ka) mo gusmoiNa !are sail ayét. which-COM words I-will-do and the womanCOM with walk don't ‘Dont (have a) walk with the woman with whom I'll speak.’ (3) Hungarian (Lipták 2005) [Akivel Mari ...

Relativisation in Maltese

This paper provides a comprehensive description of relative clause structures in standard Maltese, which is a mixed language belonging to the South Arabic branch of Central Semitic, with a Maghrebi/Siculo-Arabic stratum, a Romance (Sicilian, Italian) superstratum and an English adstratum. Where relevant, we draw attention to divergences between standard and dialectal Maltese. We provide detaile...