Judgements about double-embedded relative clauses differ between languages

Cross-linguistic differences in processing double-embedded relative clauses: Working-memory constraints or language statistics?

An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from th...

Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages

The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing.We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexitymetric, one that reflects aminimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender’s degree of uncer...

Extraction from relative and embedded interrogative clauses in Danish

In Danish relative clauses and embedded interrogative clauses are not extraction islands. However, there is an asymmetry between the two clauses. In Danish it is possible to extract the subject out of an embedded interrogative clause. Extraction of the subject out of a relative clause, on the other hand, is not allowed. In this paper we present a formal HPSG analysis of extraction in Danish whi...

Relative Clauses

In this chapter, we examine the typology of relative clauses. We will define relative clauses as follows: (1) A relative clause (RC) is a subordinate clause which delimits the reference of an NP by specifying the role of the referent of that NP in the situation described by the RC. Since the NP whose reference is being delimited is in the matrix clause, we will call it NP mat , and we will call...

Getting Rid of 'Double Relative Clauses' in Korean