"A Note on Some Even More Unusual Relative Clauses"*

1. Some general points on relative clauses In the spirit of Chomsky (1970) on ‘passive’, the notion ‘relative clause’ is unlikely to be a primitive of the language faculty. This was explicitly recognized in Chomsky (1977), to the extent that the whmovement operation that plays a role in the derivation of relative clauses also plays a role elsewhere (e.g in interrogatives). Rizzi (1997) might be interpreted as backtracking from this position insofar as the landing site for wh-movement in relatives is different (Spec,ForceP) from the landing site in interrogatives (Spec,FocP/IntP). The difference in landing site, though, could be factored out from the common movement operation, and taken instead as something to be explained. The following proposal is based on the fact that the whphrase in headed relatives is in a relation to the ‘head’ of the relative in a way that has no exact counterpart in interrogatives, which lack a comparable ‘head’: (1) Wh-movement in relatives cannot (normally) land below ForceP (or TopP1) because of locality requirements holding between the ‘head’ of the relative and the wh-phrase. The informal formulation in (1) abstracts away from the question of the correctness of the raising analysis of relatives.2 In what follows, I will assume the raising approach (perhaps not crucially). In addition to wh-movement, a second, related aspect of relative clauses that is not specific to them is the very presence of overt wh-words. A proposal expressing this non-specificity would be (cf. Postma (1994)): (2) a. The which of English (headed) relatives is identical to the which of English interrogatives (and to the which of every which way). b. The where of English relatives is identical to the where of English interrogatives, as well as to the where of somewhere, nowhere, anywhere, everywhere, elsewhere. c. and similarly for other wh-words in whatever language. Needless to say, the surrounding syntactic environment must be at least partially different in relatives, interrogatives and indefinites.3 Note that (2) does not state that the sets of wh-words occurring in relatives and interrogatives and indefinites have to match perfectly. In English where occurs in all three, but who occurs only in relatives and interrogatives. In Italian quale (‘which’) occurs in both relatives and interrogatives, but cui (‘who/what’)4 occurs only in relatives and chi (‘who’) occurs only in interrogatives (and free relatives). This point about wh-words not being specific to relative clauses carries over to those relative pronouns that are clearly related to demonstratives (such as German relative d-words). If Kayne (2010a) is correct, this point also holds for English that, which occurs both as a relative pronoun and as an ordinary demonstrative. ————————————