Strange relatives at the interface of two millennia

1, Introduction Both the traditional and the generative literature have devoted an enormous amount of attention to various aspects of the syntax and semantics of relative clause constructions in the languages of the world. Nonetheless, the nature of their semantic typology, as well as the ways in which syntactic and semantic types correlate, have been seriously addressed only quite recently. This article will attempt to highlight the major issues, controversies, and results that have arisen in this connection. At the same time, this article will not attempt to deal with issues that primarily concern syntax alone, such as the head-raising analysis, the treatment of relatives within antisymmetric frameworks, and the possibility of a unified syntactic derivational treatment for all or most relative constructions (as proposed, for example, in de Vries 2002 and various references therein). Such issues are among those that will be addressed in the next State-of-the-Article by Valentina Bianchi. The notion “relative clause” is probably harder to characterize in a general way than such notions as “declarative clause” or “interrogative clause”, in view of the greater semantic diversity of constructions that arguably deserve to be called ‘relatives’, and also in view of the existence of a variety of constructions that arguably do not deserve to be called “relatives”, but nonetheless superficially resemble bona fide relatives of some sort. The earlier literature contains a number of attempts to provide maximally general working definitions of the notion at issue. For example, de Vries (2002, p. 14) proposes the definition in (1), which is both syntactic and semantic in nature.