The syntax and semantics of english relative clauses

Abstract An analysis of English restrictive relative clauses is developed that accounts for many of the differences between them and three other clause types having the same internal structure, namely nonrestrictive relative clauses, cleft clauses, and ‘pseudo-relative’ clauses as in There are many Americans who like baseball . Section 1 is devoted to establishing the surface constituent structures of sentences involving the various relative and relative-like clauses. In sections 1 and 2 I provide evidence that pseudo-relative clauses are not restrictive relative clauses (nor are they nonrestrictive clauses) and indicate which apparent relative clauses must be classed as pseudo-relative. Section 3 is concerned with the derivation of nonrestrictive clauses. Sections 4 and 5 deal with two different analyses of restrictive relatives, each of which is supported by a sizeable body of data and appears to be irreconcileable with the data that support the other analysis. In section 6 an attempt is made to achieve a synthesis of the two analyses on the basis of a ‘core’ of grammatical rules proper and a set of ‘patches’ that serve to extend the speaker's competence to cover cases for which the core rules do not yield admissible derivations. The analyses developed make extensive use of the conception of syntactic category that is developed in McCawley 1977a, 1980b.

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