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The well-known typological feature of Slavic possessive adjectives is their ability to control personal pronouns, relative pronouns, even modifiers, i.e. their noun-like behaviour. In Slavic languages, this feature is developed to a different extent, e.g. in Sorbian to a greater, in Croatian to a lesser extent. The paper is a follow-up of previous research and puts forth new data on the possibility of Croatian possessive adjectives to control pronouns. The data is based on a corpus of recently gathered examples from contemporary texts and on a more detailed analysis of tokens gathered from online corpora, dating from the 1850s to the 2010s. It is shown to what extent the noun-like character of Croatian adjectives can be established, in which type of texts it occurs, as well as which are its consequences on the understanding of adjectives as a word class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three most common strategies used to modify a head noun, namely through a possessive, an adjective and a relative clause construction feature in Siwi the use of the preposition n. Its presence is obligatory in the possessive constructions, but only present before an adjective or a relative clause in some contexts, depending on the level of restriction that the speaker wants to place on the head noun. The aim of the article is to describe the use and function of n in all three contexts of noun modification in Siwi and present supplementary data that helps the understanding of the global function of this preposition. تصف الورقة البحثية وظيفة الحرف n في التراكيب الثلاثة الأكثر استخداماً في تقييد معنى الاسم، أي الإضافة والصفة (النعت) وجملة الوصل باللغة السيوية، وهي لغة أمازيغية يتم التحدث بها في واحة سيوة (مصر). توضح المقالة أن حرف الجرn إلزامي فقط مع الإضافة (اسم + n + اسم)، بينما يعتمد وجوده مع تراكيب كالصفة (النعت) وجملة الوصل على درجة التحديد التي يريدها المتحدث على الاسم. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the very few 'rules' that operate (almost) without exceptions in Old English prose and poetry is that in se -relatives, se is preceded by the preposition that governs it. In the entire Old English corpus, Mitchell (1985: §2244) finds only one counterexample in the Exeter Book Riddle 6 , lines 7–8. In this relative clause, the preposition on governing the demonstrative þa that functions as both antecedent and relative is postposed. The present article suggests grouping the preposition on (7b) with the adverb feorran 'far' (8a) that immediately follows it and analysing the main verb of the relative clause as transitive. As a result, the relative clause follows the 'rule': the preposition on is no longer postposed, and the pronoun þa , which functions as a direct object in the principal and relative clauses, is assigned accusative by the main verbs of both clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idiosyncrasies and peculiarities distinguishing new Englishes from the established ones are often identified and measured by examining the extent to which structural choices and patterns vary across the board. The competition between relativisers wh- and that in the construction of relative clause, which itself is a structurally complex-versus-simple construction site, allows for showing the extent to which choice of a relativiser relates to the construction of a complex or simple relative clause, given diff erent factors. On the other hand, such investigation can also shed some light on the extent to which structural complexity characterises new varieties of English. Relying on 628 relative clauses drawn from written academic corpus, the study shows that WH-relativiser is preferred to THAT-relativiser by the Nigerian speakers, and vice versa by the American speakers. It is also found that WH-relative clause is more likely to be complex-structured while THAT-relative clause is more likely to be simple-structured. Among eight factors tested for independent eff ects, the factors representing relativiser posterior syntactic form, syntactic function, and syntactic positioning of the relative clause appeared to be strong predictors of where we might (not) find a certain relativiser and whether a complex or simple relative clause will emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structures that have been referred to as relative clauses in Akan (Niger Congo, Kwa) are re-examined in light of Shibatani (2009, 2019), which shows these structures formally to be nominalizations. It is shown that Akan "relative clauses" are nominalizations in modification use. "Headless relative clauses" are shown to be argument uses of nominalizations. Evidence adduced includes the occurrence of relative structures with determiners, internal syntactic changes such as the inability to take full NPs in relevant argument positions, and external syntactic properties of occurrence as subjects and objects in clauses. Forms traditionally classed as relativizers are shown to be nominalizers or nominalization markers. The polysemous nature of these markers is seen in their occurrence with "headless genitives", which are also shown to be nominalizations. The paper highlights the value of separating form from function in syntactic analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how Korean deals with restrictions in relative clause (RC) formation. Keenan and Comrie's (1977) judgment that Korean is a language that uses the pronoun-retention strategy has had an enduring impact on later studies. However, it is highly doubtful that the pronoun-retention strategy is used in everyday situations, since in most cases an RC with a resumptive pronoun (RP) sounds unnatural in Korean. This observation suggests that there may be an alternative way to convey the function of an RC formed on a genitive NP (genitive RC). This suggestion should be tested with naturally occurring data. In this paper, therefore, genitive RCs with an RP (GRP) are investigated in the contemporary Korean corpus to discover to what extent they are in use. Simultaneously, a Korean-English parallel corpus and data from the Bible are examined to observe how English genitive RCs are expressed in their Korean counterparts. The findings show that GRPs are rarely used in Korean. Rather, Korean tends to paraphrase the genitive RC into a non-RC or a non-genitive RC to transfer the meaning of a genitive RC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A subject what needs research. Revisiting DeSchutter & Kloots 2000 De Schutter & Kloots (2000) present an explorative analysis of the use of relative pronouns and relative adverbs in seventeenth-century literary Dutch, when w-forms are gradually replacing d-forms. They argue that the incoming w-forms were informal compared to the older d-forms. In the present paper, however, it is argued that recent historical-sociolinguistic research suggests that the new w-forms represented a change from above, and thus did not index informality. More research into changes in relativization is needed, and some suggestions for future research are given at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper inquires into the structure of newly emerging relative clauses (RCs) in the Surgut dialect of Khanty, an endangered Finno-Ugric language of Western Siberia. The original externally headed RCs in this language are prenominal, with a participial verb form and a gap at the relativization site. More recently new types have been observed as well: post-nominal participles with and without ťu (a morpheme that looks identical to the distal demonstrative 'that') as well as postnominal finite RCs with a relative pronoun. These types have emerged as a result of extensive language contact with Russian, the socially dominant language of the area. The paper provides the first detailed description and analysis of the new Surgut Khanty RC types, exploring their syntactic structure as well as the extent to which language contact has shaped these structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eye-movement monitoring experiment investigated readers’ response to temporarily ambiguous sentences. The sentences were ambiguous because a relative clause could attach to one of two preceding nouns. Semantic information disambiguated the sentences. Working memory considerations predict an overall preference for the second of the two nouns, as does the late closure principle (Frazier, On comprehending sentences: Syntactic parsing strategies. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut. West Bend, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1979). Previous studies assessing preferences for such items have obtained mixed results. On-line assessments show that working memory affects the degree of preference for the first noun, with lower capacity readers having a greater preference for the second noun (Felser et al., Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 11, 127–163, 2003; Traxler, Memory & Cognition, 35, 1107–1121, 2007). Off-line assessments indicate the opposite pattern of preferences when the test sentences are displayed on a single line (Swets et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 64–81, 2007). However, when implicit prosody is manipulated by displaying the sentences with a break between the second noun and the relative clause, the off-line assessments indicate that readers prefer to attach the relative clause to the first noun. In this experiment, readers’ undertook a working memory assessment and then read test sentences that were displayed across two lines, with a break appearing after the second noun and before the relative clause. The eye-tracking data indicated an overall preference to attach the relative clause to the first noun, and there was little indication that working memory moderated the degree of preference for this configuration. Hence, it appears that readers’ implicit prosodic contours rapidly affect resolution of adjunct attachment ambiguities.

Relative Clause has been discussed as a subordinate clause used to qualify a noun. It narrows down the meaning of the noun it qualifies. A relative clause marker tí is inserted to accomplish the noun qualified having coded in the sentence initially in Yoruba language on the one hand. On the other hand, a conditional clause in Yoruba language is introduced with tí-clause by coding it in the sentence initially as well. The paper focuses on relative clause and conditional clause constructions in the Ìyàgbà dialect of Yoruba; a regional dialect in the north-east Yoruba. The author observes that though there are many scholarly works on the relative and conditional clause constructions in the Yoruba language, attention has not been paid to the relative and conditional clause constructions in the dialects of Yoruba. The data were collected from the informants from these dialect communities who reside in these communities and speak the dialects fluently, and the literature materials on these topics. The data presentation shall be based on descriptive analysis. Findings reveal that relative clause markers in the Ìyàgbà dialect are in complementary distribution; they occur in an exclusive environment. Apart from that, conditional clause markers are not attested in the dialect.

We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a rating task to examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information.

Empty categories are one of the fundamental parts of generativist’s view towards language. Empty operators, the so-called null elements, which are syntactically active in relative clauses and possibly move into [spec, CP], have reportedly been found in different languages. However, there is no solid evidence for the existence of empty operators in Persian relative clauses. Despite this, syntactic evidences such as theta theory, argument structure and subjacency condition provide satisfactory provable tests in favor of their role in Persian grammar. Namely, Persian relative clauses contain resumptive pronouns which may be covert. Their movement into [spec, CP] can precisely account for subjacency effect in relative clauses. Resumptive pronouns can occupy the subject as well as the object position. This articles attempts to introduce empty operators to Persian syntax, and shows that in such a way it is possible to account for the peculiar behavior of the Persian complementizer “ke” and its obligatory nature.