Search

The syntactic parallelism between relative clauses and adverbial clauses in English has led researchers to hypothesize that both types of clauses may share a common derivation process. While Persian relative clauses follow a different derivation pattern from English, the syntactic resemblance between Persian relative and adverbial clauses suggests a uniform derivation process. This study seeks to apply the analysis of relative clauses to adverbial clauses by adopting the most effective available approach to clarify the derivation of Persian relative clauses. One challenge lies in the absence of “-i” in the DP head, and another is the lack of a gap or resumptive pronoun. Findings indicate that the absence of the pronoun in certain temporal and conditional clauses is attributed to relativization within prepositional phrases, allowing for an ellipsis of the entire PP within the clause by analogy with the outer PP, when specific conditions are met. Non-restrictive relative clauses containing “in” (this) represent another category of adverbial clauses resulting from the relativization of an event argument. Given that this element occupies a functional projection, no gap or resumptive pronoun seems to be present. Notably, in this category of adverbial clauses, the DP head is null due to the definiteness of the nominal head. Furthermore, Persian language data validate the proposition that all adverbial clauses are PPs. Unlike English, Persian typically distinctly presents the corresponding preposition and its accompanying noun element. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe syntactic parallelism between relative clauses and adverbial clauses in English has led researchers to hypothesize that both types of clauses may share a common derivation process. While Persian relative clauses follow a different derivation pattern from English, the syntactic resemblance between Persian relative and adverbial clauses suggests a uniform derivation process. This study seeks to apply the analysis of relative clauses to adverbial clauses by adopting the most effective available approach to clarify the derivation of Persian relative clauses. One challenge lies in the absence of “-i” in the DP head, and another is the lack of a gap or resumptive pronoun. Findings indicate that the absence of the pronoun in certain temporal and conditional clauses is attributed to relativization within prepositional phrases, allowing for an ellipsis of the entire PP within the clause by analogy with the outer PP, when specific conditions are met. Non-restrictive relative clauses containing “in” (this) represent another category of adverbial clauses resulting from the relativization of an event argument. Given that this element occupies a functional projection, no gap or resumptive pronoun seems to be present. Notably, in this category of adverbial clauses, the DP head is null due to the definiteness of the nominal head. Furthermore, Persian language data validate the proposition that all adverbial clauses are PPs. Unlike English, Persian typically distinctly presents the corresponding preposition and its accompanying noun element.Keywords: Adverbial Clause, Relative Clause, Prepositional Phrase, Adverb, Conjunction Introduction The adverbial clause, a subordinate clause in compound sentences, has not been given due credence in Persian compared to complementary and relative subordinate clauses. In English, the syntactic behavior of relative and adverbial clauses is similar, with central adverbial clauses and relative clauses often exhibiting inconsistency with the main clause phenomena. This inconsistency stems from the derivation of adverbial clauses through the movement of an operator, akin to relative clauses. Local restrictions regarding movement and intervention contribute to this inconsistency. Additional evidence also supports the argument that adverbial clauses are, in fact, free relative clauses.In Persian, although relative clauses and adverbial clauses display similar syntactic behavior, neither is a product of the movement process due to the absence of local restrictions regarding movement and intervention. Karimi (2001) demonstrates that Persian relative clauses result from base generation, where the antecedent (i.e., modified noun) is initially in the specifier of the DP, "-i" occupies the head position, and its complement is a clause: [D CP]. In this structure, the relative operator resides in the specifier of the CP, and a gap or resumptive pronoun, co-indexed with the antecedent and the operator, is produced within the clause.The present research aims to determine whether adverbial clauses can be analyzed similarly, addressing questions such as whether temporal adverbial clauses can be classified as PPs, as proposed by Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria (2004), and whether this analysis can be extended to non-temporal adverbial clauses. Materials and MethodsWhen applying Karimi's (2001) analysis to Persian adverbial clauses, two main challenges arise: the absence of "-i" in the head of DP in some adverbial clauses and the lack of a gap or resumptive pronoun in any adverbial clauses. This stands in contrast to the relativization of lower-level nouns (including adjuncts), where the presence of a resumptive pronoun is typically mandatory.To address these challenges, we first examine temporal clauses, considering them as a type of PP based on Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria's (2004) perspective. Subsequently, we will explore non-temporal clauses and demonstrate how the restrictiveness of relative clauses impacts the presence or absence of an element co-indexed with the antecedent. This approach provides a rationale for the absence of "-i" in the head of DP in certain adverbial clauses.All Persian examples included in this study were created by the author, and their classification as grammatical or ungrammatical was determined based on the author's intuition. Discussion of Results and ConclusionsIn Example 1, the adverbial clause is regarded as a PP with an omitted P. Within this PP, there is a relative clause complementing the determiner "-i", and the resumptive pronoun is also omitted from this clause. Example 1b illustrates the omitted elements.The tests conducted in this research demonstrate that the rule of "removing the entire PP containing the resumptive pronoun in relative clauses" is applicable when five specific conditions are met:Relativization has occurred for the complement of the preposition.The co-indexed element in the relative clause also serves as the complement of a preposition.The prepositions involved are identical.Both PPs function as adjuncts.The adverbs are limited to time or place expressions.The reason for the aforementioned omission can be attributed to the ease of mentally accessing the deleted element. However, when examining adverbial clauses beginning with phrases such as "be mahz-e in-ke" (as soon as), "be dalile-e in-ke" (because), or "be jay-e in-ke" (instead of), it is not possible to consider such an omission under any circumstances. In these clauses, the antecedent is the demonstrative pronoun "in" (this), and the referent of this pronoun is posterior instead of preceding. The referent of "this" is the event referenced within the clause.This situation mirrors the structure of the so-called "clausal complement of nouns," whose main distinction from relative clauses lies in the absence of a co-indexed element with the antecedent. The clausal complement of nouns is a non-restrictive relative clause, with the antecedent co-indexed to an event argument within the clause. Since this element appears in one of the functional projections, it seems that clausal complements of nouns lack a gap or resumptive pronoun. Consequently, the co-indexed element is present in these clauses, enabling the defense of relativeness in other adverbial clauses containing the demonstrative pronoun "in" (this). These clauses are a form of non-restrictive relative clauses, while temporal adverbial clauses (Example 1) fall under the category of restrictive relative clauses.A characteristic feature of non-restrictive clauses is the absence of "-i" as the head of the main DP. This head is left empty when the antecedent is definite, as written Persian does not utilize a definite article. Consequently, "-i" only appears in the head of DP when dealing with relative clauses whose antecedents are indefinite.According to Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria (2004), temporal clauses are PPs that may feature either a null P or a null ZeitP (DP). Interestingly, in Persian, these two elements are prominently present in most adverbial clauses. As a result, not only can Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria's claim be substantiated by Persian data, but this analysis can also be extended to non-temporal adverbial clauses. This is because the two elements in question - a preposition and a noun - are typically found in non-temporal Persian clauses, including those pertaining to cause, purpose, opposition, negation, substitution, and condition. It is evident that during the grammaticalization process, some so-called conjunctions have lost their prepositions, some have forfeited their nominal elements, and others have experienced the loss or occasional concealment of both components. Thus, what is referred to as a conjunction actually consists of a preposition alongside its complement, the DP, which contains a relative clause.

The paper looks into the derivation of nominals in Biate at the word and sentence levels.  The derivational process at the word level is productive compared to the nominalized clauses in the language.Nominalization process is a key phenomenon in Kuki-Chin syntax. Most of the Kuki-Chin languages spoken in Assam, India, seem to follow the similar pattern of nominalization. Languages like Hrangkhol, Khelma, Hmar and others mainly has open syllabic structure like –pa, -na, -tu etc as a nominalizer to derive nominals both at the word and clausal level. Biate, has three morphological nominalizers: -tu, -na, -a and a zero morpheme which derives nominals at the word level. At the clausal level, the nominalizer –a and the zero morphemes is used.Kuki-Chin languages like Hrangkhol and Khelma use gender markers –pa (masculine) and –nu (famine) to derive nominal at word level. However, the use of gender marker is not seen in case of Biate. Normally, distal and proximal demonstratives also play an important role in the nominalization processes in Kuki-Chin languages. Βiate does have this feature. The relative clause markers in the Tibeto Burman languages behave as the nominalizer, Biate has a null relativizer.Nominalization process in Βiate differ from Khelma, Hrangkhol, Hmar and others. This paper will provide a detailed account of the nominalization process in Biate.

The article presents the Czech relative pronouns with the archaic enclitic particle -ž, which is perceived as a postfix (kdož, což, kterýž), outlining their development, frequency of usage, stylistic distribution as well as possibilities of their stylistic use in 21st-century texts. The corpus data show significant differences between the frequency of the pronouns kterýž and kdo on the one hand, and the frequency of the pronoun což on the other. The study aims to explain the frequency difference by the diverse syntactic behaviour of these expressions. While the pronouns co and což have different syntactic functions in contemporary Czech, adding the postfix “-ž” to the pronouns kdo a který does not change their syntactic function, only their stylistic value. The corpus research was focused on the occurrence of pronouns kdož and kterýž in contemporary journalistic texts, because it could be assumed that, at least for the most part, it would not be quotations from old texts. The study was based on the analysis of authentic texts from the Czech National Corpus, specifically from the corpora of contemporary written Czech SYN 2010 and SYN 2020, and from the diachronic corpus DIACORP (v 6), containing Czech written texts from the 14th to the 20th century.

The aim of this study is to investigate how pragmatic-conceptual representations can be integrated into theories of first language acquisition. Experiment 1, using a sentence–picture judgment task, examined how children (N = 53, aged 4–6 years) used prosody boundaries as cues for a recursive interpretation when the recursive relatives (i.e., SO and OO)1 were garden path structures. The results showed that children below six-year had a stronger preference for recursive reading than adults under the conjunction-biased prosody condition and that children after six years of birth exhibited an adult-like preference for recursive readings under the recursion-biased prosody condition. Experiment 2 explored whether and how reversibility (e.g., “a dog eats a banana” vs “a dog kisses a cat”) in the action schema affected the production of OO and SO in Mandarin-speaking children (N = 137, age: 4–8 years). The results showed that adult-like production of OO in both reversible and irreversible conditions appeared at the age of six. The adult-like production ability of SO showed a one-year delay in the reversible condition (seven years under the reversible condition versus six years under the irreversible condition). The study suggests that some pragmatic-conceptual representations (such as the action schema) may be precursors of language and serve as a default analysis in language acquisition, while the mapping of the prosody domain onto syntax matures over time.

There have been a growing number of corpus studies exploring the role of linguistic experience or input in sentence processing. Previous studies have used frequencies in first language (L1) corpora to represent the input of second language (L2) learners, but it has been claimed that L2 output as well as L1 output contribute to L2 acquisition and processing (Ellis 2002; Ellis and Collins 2009; Ellis and Wulff 2020). By analyzing an L2 corpus produced by Korean adult learners of English, this paper aims to establish more accurate input for L2 learners and investigate why Korean adult learners of English are sensitive to noun animacy and topicality in processing English relative clauses, as native speakers of English are. The results of the L2 corpus analysis reveal that object and subject relative clauses display different distributional patterns with respect to head noun animacy, embedded noun animacy, and the topicality of the embedded NP due to their strong tendency to have unmarked subjects and objects in terms of animacy and topicality. This paper proposes that the experience of subjecthood and objecthood, which are crosslinguistically associated with noun animacy and topicality, plays a role in producing and processing relative clauses in L2 which is syntactically different from the native language of L2 speakers. In addition, I discuss that some processing differences between L1 and L2 can arise due to L2 learners’ experience with their native language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typology which is one of the dynamic branches of linguistics tries to compare languages and attain generalizations. This approach aims at comparing languages' structures and revealing systemic patterns of variations existing among them. Word order studies is one of the most important issues in language typology which includes some variations. The order of noun and relative clause is one of those which correlates with the main word order of languages. This study aims to look into relative clauses in Azerbaijani Turkish and compare them with that of Persian. For an efficient research, data has been collected from natural recurring sentences of spoken and written standard Turkish as well as a novel titled Shaman. Afterwards, the data has been judged by the speakers' language instinct. Then every relative clause has been examined carefully. This article which is descriptive-analytic is done within the typological framework based on the work of Comrie (1989) to answer the questions of "what strategies have been conducted to construct relative clauses and where the relativizer can sit". According to the findings of this research Turkish relative clauses benefit from gap strategy and this language lacks a relativizer like "ke" in Persian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work investigates the processing behavior of large language models (LLMs) in sentences involving ambiguous relative clauses (RCs). We are particularly interested in unravelling attachment preferences of LLMs in disambiguating RCs (complementizer phrases CPs modifying a genitival phrase), which are either semantically (context-biased) or syntactically (structure-biased) associated to one of the preceding NP referents. A low interpretation of the RC occurs when it is joined to the local NP (low attachment). A high interpretation is provided when the RC modifies the distant NP (high attachment). We create a small dataset of parallel low- and high-attachment sentences. We use zero-shot prompting to evaluate a set of LLMs based on insights from psycholinguistic experiments. Our results show variability in the performance of some models that favor low attachment (semantically-related meanings in the CP) while other models can resolve ambiguity by choosing high-attachment (structure-biased CPs). The findings are discussed in light of directing future experimental studies to consider a comparative paradigm encompassing both multi-modal LLMs and human subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have engaged in a spirited debate regarding the acquisition of relative clauses for the past two decades (de Villiers, Tager Flusberg, Hakuta & Cohen, 1979; Sheldon, 1974; Slobin, 1971; Tavakolian, 1981). Early studies on the comprehension of relative clauses, referred to as RCs, utilized interactive tasks involving toys, revealing that children performed randomly until the age of five. However, a subsequent study by Hamburger & Crain (1982) on American children, which controlled for probable processing and pragmatics effects in experimental tasks, demonstrated that four-year-olds exhibited comprehension and production abilities above chance levels. Similarly, a later study by Crain et al. (1990) observed the production of such sentences by two- and three-year-old Italian children. The conflicting findings in studies on RC acquisition have prompted extensive research primarily focused on postnominal languages like English, German, and other European languages (Sheldon, 1974; Flynn & Lust, 1980; Tavakolian, 1981; Goodluck & Tavakolian, 1982; Hamburger & Crain, 1982; Lebeaux, 1990; Labelle, 1990; 1996). Conversely, there is a scarcity of studies on the L1 acquisition of RCs in prenominal languages. It is crucial to consider typologically diverse languages (e.g., Arnon, 2010; Courtney, 2006; Ozeki & Shirai, 2010) to ascertain both the universal and specific aspects of language acquisition.

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this meta-analysis follows an established and rigorous scientific method to test the generalizability of the subject preference in RC acquisition by evaluating the collective evidence. While the results show a significant crosslinguistic subject preference, there is a large amount of heterogeneity in the data. The manifestation of this subject preference may not be uniform across languages, depending on typological properties such as language headedness, RC headedness, and main clause similarity. The true impact of these features, however, requires research on more typologically diverse languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to elucidate the subject and non-subject agreement mechanisms within Yemsa relative clauses, an area not comprehensively covered by existing research. By analysing these agreement forms, the study seeks to bridge the identified gap in the understanding of Yemsa’s syntactic structures. The research questions guiding this study focus on the mechanisms through which subject agreements are manifested in Yemsa's relative clauses and the morphological markers they employ, alongside an examination of how non-subject agreements within these clauses diverge from subject agreements. The data were collected through the elicitation technique through informant interviews about subject and non-subject agreements in the Yemsa relative clauses. The data were analysed using a descriptive approach. The person-marker inventories are suffixes. Siewierska’s Prominence Hierarchy works in Yemsa. The order of the suffixes is modifier > head. Person markers simultaneously indicate masculine and feminine referents and numbers. Siewierska’s Predicate Hierarchy works on Yemsa. The suffix element -nà appears in the relative verbs. The word order in the relative clause is (O)VS. The nominative case is unmarked, whereas the accusative case is marked. The subject argument is expressed in the same manner as an independent clause. The description of the subject and the non-subject agreement in the Yemsa relative clauses has significant implications for developing the general features of Omotic and Afroasiatic languages. The study will serve as an input for the preparation of pedagogical materials in the language.

The article concerns relative clause constructions and their main clauses in Estonian and Finnish conversation. The study shows that copula clauses and existential clauses predominate in the corpus data: these two clause types accounted for more than half of the main clauses. Such main clauses serve simply to introduce a referent which is then predicated upon in the relative clause and is likely to be subsequently discussed in the conversation. In addition, relative clauses are also used without any main clauses, headed with just a nominal, a free NP. The article thus shows that the main clauses of relative clauses in Estonian and Finnish conversation tend to be syntactically light. They are also pragmatically light, since it is the relative clause, and not the main clause, which contains the main information in the clause combination. This raises a question about the subordinate status of the relative clause. Kokkuvõte. Ritva Laury, Renate Pajusalu, Marja-Liisa Helasvuo: Kas pealause on tõesti „pea”lause? Relatiivlaused eesti ja soome suulises keeles. Artikkel tegeleb relatiivlausete konstruktsioonide pealausetega eesti ja soome suulistes vestlustes. Uurimus näitab, et predikatiivlaused ja eksistentsiaallaused on suulises kõnes kõige tavalisemad, nendesse lausetüüpidesse kuulus üle poole meie materjali pealausetest. Sellised pealaused ainult esitlevad referenti, mille kohta just relatiivlause annab olulist informatsiooni. Relatiivlause konstruktsiooniga vestlusesse toodud referent on hiljem tihti edasise vestluse oluline teema. Lisaks kasutatakse relatiivlauseid tihti ilma pealauseteta, nii et nad laiendavad vaba nimisõnafraasi. Artikkel näitab seega, et eesti ja soome vestluste relatiivlausete pealaused on süntaktiliselt kerged. Nad on kerged ka pragmaatiliselt, kuna just relatiivlause, mitte aga pealause, annab põhilise informatsiooni. Siit tekib küsimus relatiivlause kui kõrvallause staatusest ja selle alistatusest.

This study aims to re-examine the essential notion of "gap" in the studies of relative clauses. Following Creissels' (Creissels, Denis. 2006. Syntaxe générale: une introduction typologique. Paris: Hermès; Creissels, Denis. 2019. Remarks on the typology of noun-modifying clause constructions. Paper presented at the Conference of Complex Sentences, Central China Normal University, 26–29 July) discussion, we argue that there are at least three types of gaps in terms of their respective compositions, namely the gap corresponding to a zero-marked constituent, the gap corresponding to a case-marked constituent, and the gap corresponding to an adposition-marked constituent. This classification, which is not based on the grammatical relation of the relativized constituent in the relative clause but focuses on the composition of the gap, can better explain the existence of the so-called "enlarged gap", a special type of gap that has been almost completely ignored so far. Moreover, this marking-based approach can shed new light on Keenan and Comrie's (Keenan, Edward & Bernard Comrie. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8(1). 63–99) Accessibility Hierarchy. In particular, we argue that some interplay of the syntactic position and the morphological marking of a syntactic object determines whether the constituent can be relativized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-standing question in sentence processing research concerns the online parsing process in clause-boundary garden-path sentences, such as After Mary dressed John bathed. In this sentence, "John" must be parsed as the matrix subject DP but can be locally analysed as the object of the embedded verb. There is considerable evidence that the parser misanalyses these garden-path sentences. However, the controversy lies in whether the parser revises them during the online parsing process. The present study investigated this revision process through two self-paced reading experiments utilising grammatical constraints on reflexives and subject or object relative clauses embedded within the locally ambiguous DP. The results provided evidence of revision when a subject relative clause was embedded but not when an object relative clause was embedded. These findings suggest that the parser assigns grammatical structures that correspond to input strings during the revision of clause-boundary ambiguities but that object relative clauses affect the online revision process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to elucidate the subject and non-subject agreement mechanisms within Yemsa relative clauses, an area not comprehensively covered by existing research. By analysing these agreement forms, the study seeks to bridge the identified gap in the understanding of Yemsa's syntactic structures. The research questions guiding this study focus on the mechanisms through which subject agreements are manifested in Yemsa's relative clauses and the morphological markers they employ, alongside an examination of how non-subject agreements within these clauses diverge from subject agreements. The data were collected through the elicitation technique through informant interviews about subject and non-subject agreements in the Yemsa relative clauses. The data were analysed using a descriptive approach. The person-marker inventories are suffixes. Siewierska's Prominence Hierarchy works in Yemsa. The order of the suffixes is modifier > head. Person markers simultaneously indicate masculine and feminine referents and numbers. Siewierska's Predicate Hierarchy works on Yemsa. The suffix element -nà appears in the relative verbs. The word order in the relative clause is (O)VS. The nominative case is unmarked, whereas the accusative case is marked. The subject argument is expressed in the same manner as an independent clause. The description of the subject and the non-subject agreement in the Yemsa relative clauses has significant implications for developing the general features of Omotic and Afroasiatic languages. The study will serve as an input for the preparation of pedagogical materials in the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Case conflict in relative clauses is observed when a relative pronoun carries Case different from the one associated with its base position. Instead, it appears with Case that is identical to Case of its antecedent that is external to the relative clause. This phenomenon - commonly referred to as Case Attraction - is attested in languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin, and German. It is also easily observed in Modern Standard Arabic where the relative pronoun shows agreement in Case, gender and number with the noun modified by the relative clause. The original position of the relative pronoun is normally filled with a resumptive pronoun that represents the features of the relative pronoun. This study adopts the most recent assumptions of the Minimalist Program to account for the behavior of Arabic relative pronouns. It assumes that the relative clause is right adjoined to the noun it modifies and the relative pronoun moves to a left peripheral position within the structure of the relative clause leaving behind a copy. At a later stage of the derivation, Case of the relative pronoun is unified with Case of its antecedent. The unified Case feature is then valued under Agree with a higher head. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Estonian & Finno-Ugric Linguistics / Eesti ja Soome-ugri Keeleteaduse Ajakiri is the property of University of Tartu Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the morphology, syntax, and semantics of five non-interrogative constructions that involve wh-expressions in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language of the K'ichean branch spoken in Guatemala. We focus on the properties of maximal free relative clauses, existential free relative clauses, ever free relative clauses, free choice items and negative indefinites. We show that the interpretive properties of these constructions are strikingly similar to those found in a number of unrelated languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determiner spreading, the phenomenon whereby adnominal modifiers carry an ‘additional’ determiner, has been studied extensively for a variety of languages, most notably Greek, Semitic, and Scandinavian languages. Interestingly, the same phenomenon occurs in the Bantu language Rukiga. We show how the Rukiga augment is parallel to the Greek determiner in the context of modification, and how it triggers a restrictive reading when present on a larger class of modifiers than familiar so far: relative clauses, adjectives, possessives, and certain quantifiers. Considering its morphosyntactic and interpretational properties, we propose that the variation in the presence versus absence of the augment on modifiers is due to different underlying structures, applying an analysis of determiner spreading in terms of a reduced relative clause structure.

The study describes a set of configurations in which CE (translated variously « this », « that » or « it ») is absent or present in the testimonials of the ancient language and compares them to the achievements of the contemporary language in order to draw the history of these constructions and to show the changes in the CE status. At the end of the study, the invariant CE appears as a perfect example of the transcategorisation phenomenon.

The present study investigated the role of explicit instruction on the acquisition of English relative clauses by focusing on resumptive pronouns among Iranian learners of English at an intermediate level of proficiency. The study focused on two structurally different languages (Persian and English) regarding the use of resumptive pronouns. A grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) and a Sentence Combination Task (SCT) at three phases of pre-test, immediate, and delayed posttests, have been used; paired samples t-tests showed that exposure to input through teaching materials can improve the learners’ performance in specific types of relative structures, but not in all. The findings propose that if language learners, especially in a foreign language context, are provided with enough input and still don’t acquire an uninterruptable feature (resumptive pronouns in this case), then it can be said that fossilization has occurred and the interpretability hypothesis (Tsimpli and Dimitrakopolou, 2007) will be confirmed. It also shows that explicit teaching can lead to future noticing in input and result in more stable acquisition.

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have been shown to struggle with the acquisition of complex structures requiring structural embedding and movement of a sentential element from its original position. This study examines the production of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) by Italian children, investigating whether: i) seven-year-old children with DLD are impaired in embedding or movement operations; ii) specific factors, such as animacy of the arguments, affect the production of sentences with movement and embedding, iii) the linguistic profile of children with DLD is qualitatively different from that of typically developing (TD) children. We elicited the production of RCs with animate and inanimate arguments in 12 Italian-speaking children with DLD (mean age = 7;2) and in two TD control groups: age matched (AM) and language matched (LM). Children with DLD produced fewer RCs than either control group and made different errors, showing a slightly different developmental path. Animacy mismatch did not improve RC production in any group. Results suggest that seven-year-old children with DLD are in a transitional stage: they can use embedding but still have difficulties with movement operations, especially in object RCs. This indicates that the language competence of children with DLD improves with age, but long-distance dependencies continue to be challenging.

This paper deals with the so-called 'expletive' mismo 'same', a non-comparative emphatic use of the prenominal adjective in appositions, which is currently attested in many varieties of American Spanish (e.g., Finalmente, Laura se sentó y aceptó el cigarrillo, mismo que nunca encendió 'lit. Laura finally sat down and accepted the cigarette, same that she never lighted up'). On the basis of corpus data, the geographical distribution of this form is precisely specified, and a novel analysis of its interpretive and combinatorial properties is provided. It is argued, in particular, that expletive mismo functions as an anaphoric reinforcer that is preceded by a null definite determiner and combines with an empty noun that takes a restrictive relative clause as its complement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines semantic features and functions of free relative clauses with pronominal relativizers, represented in the Croatian Glagolitic folk medicine books from the 14th, 15th and 18th centuries. Prediction, projection and topicality are singled out as central conceptual and functional features of the expressions studied. The examples are interpreted from the aspect of construction grammar and the pragmatic aspect, and therefore a schematic representation of mental spaces forming the basis for the selected relative clauses has been constructed using the methodology presented in Dancygier and Sweetser (2005). The expressions studied are also viewed in the context of the titling function, as well as in the context of all relative clauses in the studied corpus and have therefore also been linked to the specific features of the text type and certain diachronic changes in their use have been observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In second language learning, relative clauses are widely studied. However, research comparing Indonesian and foreign learners’ clauses based on animacy has not been widely done. Besides, animacy affects the difficulty of producing relative clauses. Therefore, this study investigates the role of animacy in the production of relative clauses, the relationship between movement distance and the production of relative clauses, and the role of animacy in conformity with the rules of relative clauses. This research employs a descriptive case study. Data was collected from documents on popular article texts of Indonesian and foreign learners of the University of Muhammadiyah Malang. The data were analyzed based on the generative transformation theory developed by Noam Chomsky. The study results show that animacy plays a significant role in producing relative clauses. Indonesian and foreign learners compose more relative clauses on inanimate nouns, which function as subjects, objects, and complements. Foreign learners create more relative objects than subjects. Based on distance, short-movement relative clauses are very productive for Indonesian and foreign learners. Most Indonesian (97%) and foreign (85%) learners have produced relative clauses that conform to the rules. However, relative clauses with inanimate head nouns often break the rules.

This article concerns insubordination, the use of clause types ordinarily considered subordinate without main clauses (Evans 2007). We study the use of insubordinate relative clauses (RCs) in two corpora, the Arkisyn corpus of contemporary Finnish conversation and the Agricola corpus from the 16th century. Our main findings are that the construction is put to very similar uses in the two corpora, but that it is more common in the newer corpus. We show that insubordination of RCs existed along with subordination already in the earliest records of Finnish language use. Thus, insubordination of RCs is not a more recent development than their use as subordinate clauses. We conclude that the more frequent use in the newer data is likely not a result of a process of grammaticalization that would have occurred since the 16th century. Kokkuvõte. Marja-Liisa Helasvuo, Ritva Laury: Pealauseta relatiivlaused soome keeles – vanad ja uued. Siinses artiklis käsitleme insubordinatsiooni ehk teiste sõnadega selliseid lauseid, mis loetakse tüüpjuhul kõrvallauseteks, kuid esinevad ilma pealauseta. Uurime soome keele relatiivlauseid, millel puudub pealause. Keeleainestik pärineb kahest korpusest: tänapäeva soome kõnekeelt sisaldavast korpusest Arkisyn ja 16. sajandi keelenäiteid sisaldavast korpusest Agricola. Meie tähelepanekud näitavad, et mainitud konstruktsioon esineb mõlemas keelekorpuses, kuid uuemas ainestikus on selle kasuta- mine tavalisem. Osutame oma uurimuses, et nii insubordinatsioon kui subordinatsioon esinevad juba varajastes soome keele tekstides. Seega ei ole ilma pealauseta relatiivlause kasutamine uuem keelenähtus kui pealausega relatiivlausete kasutamine. Meie uurimus näitab, et insubordinatsiooni sagedasemat esinemist uuema keeleainestiku relatiivlausetes ei peaks tõlgendama 16. sajandist alates arenema hakanud grammatikaliseerumise nähtusena.

As a multifunctioning morpheme, “ke” is actively present in both systems of speech and writing. In addition to its wide usage as an “Indefinite Pronoun”, “Complementizer”, “Focus Marker” and etc., the Complementizer “ke” adapting to no change appears at the beginning of Relative Clauses and accepts several different roles. This research is an attempt to study the grammatical, semantical and pragmatival functions of "ke" in Persian Relative Clauses. To present a rather comprehensive analysis, it provides a corpus of natural occurring data in Persian. The grammatical, semantical and pragmatical functions of “ke” was thoroughly studied in Relative Clauses afterward. This descriptive-analytic research which is within typological approach based on Comrie’s (1989) typological framework is an attempt to find the right answers to the following questions: which grammatical, semantic and pragmatic roles does “ke” have in Persian Relative Clauses? Regarding the main hypothesis, “ke” plays all the grammatical roles a noun phrase can have such as “subject, object, etc”. Findings show that “ke” presents various semantic roles like “agent, patient, …” as well as a “Focus Marker” next to any constituent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguists today presuppose that for both description/analysis and comparison of languages, there is a substantial set of universal crosslinguistic categories. In the same way, in the grammaticisation of non-European languages, missionaries took the grammatical categories elaborated for Latin as a set of universal crosslinguistic categories. One could assume that they fell into the trap of transferring time-tested terminology from traditional Latin grammar adapting it to the description of a language with rather different structural properties without really capturing its 'genius'. Even if this assumption may certainly be true to some extent, it does not present the whole picture and it does not do justice to the efforts missionaries made in describing new languages. Therefore, focusing on how missionaries understood and described the Tamil relative clause and relativiser marker, this paper aims to discuss the tension arising in grammatical descriptions between language-particular categories and crosslinguistic conceptual transfer. The paper thus demonstrates how missionaries did not limit their accounts to the transfer of a priori grammatical categories, tailored for Latin and applied to Tamil, but rather how they refined their descriptions through a crosslinguistic conceptual transfer that may be considered the first step towards comparative concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the usage of the relative clause as a wealthy, crucial and complicated syntactic procedure in modern English Literature through the examination of Amaka Azuike's Violated, a short play. The study determined the use of relative clauses in terms of their frequency of occurrence and type used, and it showed that English language speakers mostly attempt to use the "easier" type of the relative clauses to combine sentences for clarity of relaying messages. The paper extracted examples of relative clauses from Violated to determine its aim of identifying the types of relative clauses used and the frequency of occurrence as well as the functions of the relative clauses in the play. The study also exposed the clarity the reader derives from the author's use of relative clauses in creating a visible mental picture of issues presented in the story. The study adopted the descriptive grammar framework to account for the way relative clauses have been used in the play by the author. The study found that the author of the text used finite relative clauses and only one complex relative clause. Also, it discovered that the usage of relative clauses made the story quite state-of-the-art in style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the role of explicit instruction on the acquisition of English relative clauses by focusing on resumptive pronouns among Iranian learners of English at an intermediate level of proficiency. The study focused on two structurally different languages (Persian and English) regarding the use of resumptive pronouns. A grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT) and a Sentence Combination Task (SCT) at three phases of pre-test, immediate, and delayed posttests, have been used; paired samples t-tests showed that exposure to input through teaching materials can improve the learners' performance in specific types of relative structures, but not in all. The findings propose that if language learners, especially in a foreign language context, are provided with enough input and still don't acquire an uninterruptable feature (resumptive pronouns in this case), then it can be said that fossilization has occurred and the interpretability hypothesis (Tsimpli and Dimitrakopolou, 2007) will be confirmed. It also shows that explicit teaching can lead to future noticing in input and result in more stable acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Estonian & Finno-Ugric Linguistics / Eesti ja Soome-ugri Keeleteaduse Ajakiri is the property of University of Tartu Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study investigates two possible factors in the well-known subject preference in the acquisition and processing of relative clauses (RCs): (i) an effect of similarity between declarative and relative clauses and (ii) an effect of frequency of certain RC types. Two production experiments were conducted with adult and child speakers of Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a Philippine-type voice system. One experiment elicited declarative clauses and the other elicited relative clauses; both had two animacy conditions: animate-animate (animate agent and patient) and animate-inanimate (animate agent, inanimate patient). Experiment 1’s results show a preference for patient voice in the animate-animate condition only. Experiment 2’s results show a preference for the relativization of the agent in the animate-inanimate condition only. We suggest that the interplay of a patient voice preference in Tagalog with a general preference for the relativization of agents – the source of which remains undetermined – may explain these results.

Introduction: The source of costs is a primary concern in code-switching, yet a consensus has not yet been reached. This study investigates whether code-switching during syntactic processing in Chinese-English dual languages results in a cost. Methods: We use Chinese and English relative clauses in either object (Experiment 1) or subject (Experiment 2, which has a more complex structure) positions to test the costs in syntactic processing. Forty-seven Chinese-English bilinguals and 17 English-Chinese bilinguals participated in acceptability judgment tests and self-paced reading experiments. Results: The statistical findings indicate that syntactic processing is a source of the costs incurred in code-switching, as evidenced by the code-switching costs observed in the head movement during relative clause comprehension. Discussion: The outcomes are consistent with the implications of the 4-Morpheme Model and the Matrix Language Framework. Additionally, the experiment shows that the processing of relative clauses depends on the underlying structures, which is consistent with the Dependency Locality Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine relative uses of Polish że, which is normally regarded as a 'that'-type complementizer. As is shown with corpus data, że is in some contexts used as a non-canonical relativizer in colloquial spoken language, a use which may be seen as a relic function reflecting the historical origin of the subordinator. Crucially, I argue that contemporary relative uses of że are restricted to a specific functional variety, i. e. the presentational relative construction, as developed by, among others, Lambrecht (1988a, 1988b), Duffield et al. (2010), and Murelli (2011). Additional issues that will be addressed are the varying degrees of clausal integration and the rather fluid continuum of the very functions performed by że: its relative uses, general subordinator uses, że marking elaboration/reformulation, as well as the relativization/complementation contrast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Jezikoslovlje is the property of University of Osijek, Faculty of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article investigates the structural and interpretative properties of relative clauses in Shupamem, an under-studied Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon, focusing on the integration status of non-restrictive relative clauses, an under-researched aspect of relative clause syntax. We show that non-restrictive relatives have the same properties as restrictive relatives in the language and argue that considerations relating to illocutionary independence, scope relations with matrix negation and intentional verbs, VP ellipsis, pronominalization, binding, weak crossover effects, parasitic gaps, and split antecedents, among others, support the conclusion that Shupamem non-restrictive relatives are clause-internal nominally-integrated syntactic objects, as in Italian and Mandarin Chinese. This finding supports Cinque's (2008) discovery that non-restrictive relative clauses come in both integrated and non-integrated varieties, and typologically places Shupamem among the languages of the world that exclusively manifest the integrated non-restrictive relative clause structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated whether L1-English Chinese learners show a subject preference in their oral production of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) and whether they show animacy effects. We conducted a picture-based elicited production experiment that compared subject and object RCs, varying the object animacy between animate and inanimate. The results from thirty learners showed more targetlike performance in subject RCs than in object RCs, both at group and individual levels, regardless of object animacy. Error analyses revealed that more object RCs were converted into subject RCs than vice versa. These results point toward a clear subject preference despite conflicted findings in previous research on RCs in Chinese as a foreign language. Animacy influenced subject and object RCs alike: both types were easier to produce when featuring an inanimate object. We suggested similarity-based interference or distribution-based effects to account for this finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The NasirKhusraw Travelogue as the very first Farsi travelogue remaining from 5th century (more than 1000 years ago) has been subject of many studies in a variety of fields including literature, historical and social studies, or even historical architect studies. Yet few studies have been carried out from linguistic viewpoint to show its capacities as a linguistic data source. The current study probes on relative clause extraposition and its motivations as a non-obligatory movement mostly based on functional and discourse criteria. In many languages relative clause is mostly a clause that acts as a modifier for a head Np located in main clause. This modifier clause can appear right after (or based on the language word order before ) the NP that is defined by the clause and in this case it is named canonical relative clause. Or it can be dislocated and be moved to the end of the sentence (named extraposed relative clause) Since there is no syntactic need to force this movement, the motivations of relative clause extraposition were explained to be discourse factors (Francis,2010) such as Grammatical weight of clause (Hawkins,1990 &2004), verb information Structure (Sheykho’l Eslami, 2008) and a combination of some different factors together (Rasekh-Mahand et.al, 2012). Current study aimed to analyze the motivations of extrapositon relative clauses in historical proses. The NasirKhusraw Travelogue was studied and about 230 relative clauses were extracted based on systematic sampling which cover nearly more than half of the book.

In ancient Greek, relative pronouns are, as a rule, subject to wh-movement and obligatorily surface at the left edge of the relative clause. However, the archaic poet Pindar sometimes allows material belonging to the relative clause to appear in front of the relative pronoun, which is then postponed within its clause. In this paper, I survey all relative clauses in the surviving texts by Pindar and study the possible differences in semantics and syntax between relative clauses with initial and postponed relative pronouns, which turn out to be indistinguishable in both respects. I suggest that postponed relative pronouns do move syntactically to the Spec of their relative clause but are then optionally treated as postpositive words and surface in second position in the relative clause. Phonological arguments, based on the distributional properties of postpositive words and on the metrical makeup of Pindar’s texts, are put forward to show how postponed relative pronouns select a host at the left edge of the relative clause and incorporate phonologically to it. The informational status of relative pronouns as ratified (given) topics triggers their phonological demoting, which turns them into postpositive words, a regular process in ancient Greek. Approaching the position of relative pronouns as a conflict between syntactic and (informationally driven) phonological alignment explains why Pindar’s strategy for relativization remained rare in ancient Greek and eventually disappeared: It took one specific poetic genre to allow phonology to outrank syntax.

This paper argues that correlative constructions in Hittite are paratactically structured. The relative clause is essentially a clausal hanging topic, sitting at the left edge of the main clause in linear juxtaposition without actually being an integrated part of it, syntactically speaking. I defend this claim in two stages. First, I argue that correlatives in Hittite are base-generated in their left-edge position rather than derived through movement (as advocated for Hindi by, e.g., Bhatt 2003). I adduce as evidence the fact that the main clause correlate appears to be simply a discourse anaphor and need not even be present in the construction; these observations are incompatible with a movement-based derivation that generates the relative clause as a modifier of the correlate. There is also evidence for a lack of locality effects. The second part of my claim, that Hittite correlatives are not syntactically integrated, differs from most base-generation accounts of correlatives, which take correlatives to be clausal adjuncts. I support my position with parallels to hanging topics and peripheral adverbials (Haegeman 2012) and with examples of intervening non-subordinate clauses, and I offer some comments on why syntactic adjunction is less well suited to the Hittite situation. I also show that Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides 2003) accommodates these structures, including some notably non- canonical ones, in a simple and principled way.

The need for automatic text summarization (ATS) is increased manifold in recent times due to the overwhelming growth of textual data available in electronic form. However, existing ATS systems suffer from two major shortcomings. Summarizers of extractive type, that is, the ones which select important sentences of the documents in their original form as the output, tend to copy some irrelevant or unimportant parts of the input text in the output summary. On the other hand, abstractive summarizers, that is, the ones that produce a gist of the limited size of the original document, often fail to include important contents in the generated summary. Simplification of the input texts before submitting them to the ATS system(s) may obliterate the above difficulties. The present work examines the effectiveness of simplification of input for five different known ATS systems. In this work, DEPSYM++ simplifier has been used for the above purpose, which carries out four different kinds of simplification on sentences of the input text corresponding to the presence of appositive clause, relative clause, conjoint clause, and passive voice. The results obtained are found to be very encouraging when experiments were carried out on three different gold data sets and under different evaluation metrics commonly used for performance evaluation for summarizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-known that native English speakers sometimes erroneously accept subject-verb agreement violations when there is a number-matching attractor (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were...). Whether bilinguals whose L1 lacks number agreement are prone to such interference is unclear, given previous studies that report conflicting findings using different structures, participant groups, and experimental designs. To resolve the conflict, we examined highly proficient Korean–English bilinguals' susceptibility to agreement attraction, comparing prepositional phrase (PP) and relative clause (RC) modifiers in a speeded acceptability judgment task and a speeded forced-choice comprehension task. The bilinguals' judgments revealed attraction with RCs but not with PPs, while reaction times indicated attraction with both structures. The results therefore showed L2 attraction in all measures, with the consistent exception of judgments for PPs. We argue that this supports an overall native-like agreement processing mechanism, augmented by an additional monitoring mechanism that filters explicit judgments in simple structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study describes a set of configurations in which CE (translated variously « this », « that » or « it ») is absent or present in the testimonials of the ancient language and compares them to the achievements of the contemporary language in order to draw the history of these constructions and to show the changes in the CE status. At the end of the study, the invariant CE appears as a perfect example of the transcategorisation phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates left-dislocated free relatives in Old English. On the theoretical level, it contributes to the ongoing discussion on the syntax of free relatives. It confirms a sharp distinction between wh-free relatives and demonstrative free relatives. The former type favours the Comp analysis, whereas the latter class is amenable to both the Comp and Head analyses. On the empirical level, it provides evidence that the Comp analysis with wh-pronouns is selected mainly on the basis of pied piping/stranding facts, while case marking regulates the choice of an appropriate analysis with demonstrative free relatives with þe. This corpus-based study also offers some quantitative information on the frequent patterns and cases commonly found in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]