Effect of Relative Pronoun Type on Relative Clause Attachment

Accessibility hierarchies (Ariel, 1990, 2001; Givón, 1992; Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski, 1993) assume that the form of anaphoric expressions signals the relative saliency of the antecedent. We argue that the form of relative pronouns in relative clauses has a similar function and therefore influences attachment preferences. We conducted two questionnaire experiments in which we investigated whether attachment preferences for ambiguous relative clauses are affected by the type of relative pronoun that is used. Experiment 1 showed a difference in attachment preference between qui and lequel, indicating that the form of the relative pronoun affects attachment preferences. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the difference observed in Experiment 1 is not due to differences in informativity between qui and lequel, suggesting that instead, it is due to a difference in markedness (qui is more frequent and shorter).