HEADED RELATIVES, FREE RELATIVES, AND DETERMINER-HEADED FREE RELATIVES

Formal Linking in Internally-Headed Relatives

This paper aims to clarify and resolve issues surrounding the so-called formal linking problem in interpreting the Internally Headed Relative Clause construction in Korean and Japanese, a problem that has been identified in recent E-type pronominal treatments of the construction (e.g., Hoshi 1995, Shimoyama 1999). In the literature, this problem refers to the difficulty of capturing the delimit...

Reconstruction and (Free) Relatives

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 ...

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 ...

Free Relatives and Ever: Identity and Free Choice Readings

This paper explores three questions about the semantics of free relatives (FRs). One, do FRs have a uniform meaning? Two, related to one, what is the contribution of ever? And three, perhaps less discussed than the other two, what is the relation between identity and free choice (FC) readings of FRs with ever? It claims that FRs are always definite. Ever introduces a type of modality that is in...