English Relative Clause Constructions
نویسنده
چکیده
Abstract This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The grammar presented here provides an account of extraction, pied piping and relative clause ‘stacking’ without appeal to transformational operations, transderivational competition, or invisible (‘empty’) categories of any kind.
منابع مشابه
Gapless Relative Clauses as Clausal Licensors of Relational Nouns
This paper presents a novel analysis of so-called gapless relative clause constructions such as Mandarin xiangpi ranshao de weidao (literally, ‘the smell that rubber burns’). Such constructions have been observed in East Asian languages. It is claimed that the Head noun of such relative clauses are relational nouns, and the clauses are their licensors. Syntactically, the Head nouns are predicat...
متن کاملThe English relative clause
A computer grammar is described which includes most of the English relative-clause constructions. It is written in the form of a left-to-right phrase-structure grammar with discontinuous constituents and subscripts, which carry such syntactic restrictions as number and verb government category. The motivation for the hierarchy of syntactic choices and for the use of discontinuous constituents i...
متن کاملEnglish Free Relative Clause Constructions : From a Constraint-Based Perspective
Like other Indo-European languages, English also employs a particular type of relative clause constructions, the so-called free-relative constructions, exemplified by the phrase like what Kim ate. This paper provides a constraint-based approach to these constructions. The paper begins with surveying on the properties of the construction. We will discuss two types of free relatives, their lexica...
متن کاملRelative Importance in English and Persian: Thematization or Tonic Prominence?
There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. The former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (Halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. This study explores how relative importance is realized in English and Persian. It also investigates how advanced Persian learne...
متن کاملSemantic Priming Effect on Relative Clause Attachment Ambiguity Resolution in L2
This study examined whether processing ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) following a complex determiner phrase (DP) by Persian-speaking learners of L2 English with different proficiency and working memory capacities (WMCs) is affected by semantic priming. The semantic relationship studied was one between the subject/verb of the main clause and one of the DPs in the complex D...
متن کامل