Defining relatives 6Mar2013

This paper uses a case study of scientific English from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries to test the traditional demarcation between restrictive and non-restrictive adnominal relatives and to reconsider appropriate methods for analyzing such historical data. After an initial classification of some 1160 clauses from the ARCHER corpus using the traditional dichotomy, alternative proposals for analyzing relative clauses are reviewed in the light of problematic examples. The concept of “aspective” relatives (Wood 1952; Sigley 1997) is adopted: those having most of the formal and pragmatic hallmarks of restrictive relatives while not strictly restrictive in the set-theoretic sense. We identify these with the clauses in present-day English that are not restrictive but which Huddleston, Pullum, and Peterson (2002) include under the heading “integrated.” We add a fourth, minor type, “continuative.” Nevertheless our data present problems even for a four-way classification. We demonstrate how some analytic difficulties are due to changes in text-type-specific style and conventions over time, plus general diachronic change, but also that some examples genuinely resist hard-and-fast classification. We therefore treat our classes as overlapping bands on a one-dimensional gradient, testing the revised classification in detail on our seventeenth-century data. The overlaps are less numerous than any of the three main types (restrictive, aspective, and non-restrictive), but they help to reduce the number of unclear cases from over a quarter of the total in our initial classification to a mere one percent. We 6 Mar 2013 Final authors’ revision before copyediting (to include renumbering of notes from 13 onwards). To be published in Journal of English Linguistics 41.2