The Psychological Reality of Head - Final Relative Clauses

Relative clauses (RCs) are subordinate clauses embedded within nominal phrases. Semantically, this embedded clause modifies the dominating nominal head. Syntactically, the nominal head is associated with an empty element within the subordinate clause. RCs have received great attention from language researchers as they demonstrate crucial properties of the human language. They enable recursion in language creating the possibility that one clause can be infinitely embedded in another. They also show that some linguistic expressions are unpronounced and should be associated with other expressions within the same sentence. The dependency between the expressed and the unpronounced elements (in this case between a relativized gap and a nominal head) need not be local, which demonstrates the importance of phrase-structure grammar in establishing discontinuous dependent relationships. Across languages, relative constructions vary regarding whether the head noun precedes or follows the RC. Languages with head-initial RCs, such as English, have the head nouns preceding the RCs. Languages with head-final RCs (e.g. Chinese and Japanese) have the head nouns following the RCs. With such typological variation regarding head positions, a natural question is whether head-initial and head-final relativizations observe similar structural representations and derivations. From the perspective of sentence processing, the crucial question becomes whether head-initial and head-final RCs share similar structural representations and whether these structures are processed in the same fashion. Various proposals have been made regarding the structure of head-initial and head-final RCs. The most salient issues concern whether the empty noun phrase in the RC should be analyzed as a trace or an unpronounced pronoun and whether the RC itself is a complement or an adjunct of the head noun. The formal analysis proposed by Aoun and Li (2003) distinguished between headinitial and head-final RCs in terms of the RC-head relations. They adopted complementation and adjunction for the structures of head-initial and head-final RCs respectively. More extreme conjectures were also proposed. In particular, head-final RCs are taken to be adjective-like and involve adjunctive relations with the modified noun rather than standard trace/movement-based relations (Huang, 2007; Matsumoto, 1997). The major argument for the latter approach is that with head-final RCs, the RCs are actually modifying-clauses attached to a noun. Essentially, the