The present response time study investigated how a hypothesized time-based working memory constraint of 2-3 s affects the resolution of grammatical and semantic dependencies. Congruent and incongruent object relative (OR) and subject relative sentences were read at different presentation rates so that the distance between dependent words was either shorter or longer than 2-3 s. Incongruent OR s...

Malagasy, spoken throughout Madagascar, is a Western Austronesian language with a characteristically rich voice system. In this paper we show first how to derive and compositionally interpret nuclear clauses built from verbs in different voices. They are directly projected from verbal affixes, not derived by A or A′ movement. Theta role assignment follows explicitly from semantic interpretation...

Japanese has both head-external and head-internal relative clauses (HERC & HIRC). Example (1a) shows a standard HERC. In contrast, the HIRC in (1b) has the form of an independent sentence, the bold-faced head occurring inside the relative, and it is followed by the complementizer -no and a case morpheme that relates the internal head to the matrix verb. A core question is what the interpretatio...

Definitions that children provide can be a valuable measure of their syntax, and specifically, of their ability to produce relative-clauses. This research explored the acquisition of subject-, object-, and indirect-object-relative clauses in 121 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;5-8;6. The children were asked to define 14 nouns, and their responses were collected and analyzed for various syntacti...

Based on the definition of the relative clause from Song (2001), this paper examines the relative clause in the Hui’an dialect from four parameters: (a) the relativization marker used; (b) the position of the head noun relative to the restricting clause; (c) the role and encoding of the head noun in the restricting clause; and (d) the role and encoding of the head noun in the main clause. The H...

Recently, M.-J. Kim (2008) provided a reformulation of the Relevancy Condition on kes-relative clauses (kes-RCs) (Kim, Y.-B. 2002), the so-called internally headed relative clauses in Korean. In her analysis, the bipartite conditions of Kim (2002), one involving simultaneity between the main and the relative clause and the other involving a ‘resultant theme’, are collapsed into one involving a ...

Various studies have reported that subject relative clauses (the boy who likes the woman) are easier to produce and comprehend than object relatives (the boy that the woman likes). To expand this discussion, this study investigates young children’s production of head-final relative clauses in Korean. In particular, it is examined whether Korean children acquire relativization in the order predi...

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...