Prenominal Relative Clauses in Verb-Object Languages *

The combination of verb-object order with prenominal relative clauses is extremely rare; Dryer (2005e) finds it in only 5 languages in his sample of 756; of these, 3 are Sinitic, one is Sino-Tibetan (probably reflecting either shared ancestry or contact with Chinese), and the fifth is the Formosan language Amis. While it is tempting to suggest contact with Chinese as the explanation for this pattern in Amis, further investigation goes against this hypothesis, since the same pattern is found in some other Formosan languages, does not correlate with degree of Chinese influence, and may be old in the Austronesian family. This similarity between Sinitic and Amis may be due to chance, though it is also conceivable that it could reflect genealogical or contact relations in the more distant past. The rarity of the combination of verb-object order with prenominal relative clauses has led some linguists to suggest a processing explanation that would mitigate against this combination. However, although rare, the combination seems stable in at least some of the languages where it occurs (e.g. Sinitic), and recent work in child language acquisition suggests that the combination may actually provide a processing advantage to the child acquiring the grammatical relations in a relative clause relativizing an object.