Resumption and gaps in English relative clauses: Relative acceptability creates an illusion of ‘saving’

Resumption by Buffers: German Relative Clauses

In a local derivational (phase-based) approach to syntax, instances of resumption in German (longdistance) relativization constructions with an empty operator and a complementizer wo (‘where’) must be analyzed in terms of movement. Against this background, these constructions raise three problems for syntactic analysis: (i) a locality (backtracking) problem (‘How can the information that a resu...

Learning of relative clauses by L3 learners of English

In surveys of third language acquisition (TLA) research, mixed results demonstrate that there is no consensus among researchers regarding the advantages and/or disadvantages of bilinguality on  TLA.  The  main  concern  of  the  present  study  was,  thus,  to  probe  the  probable  differences between  Persian  monolingual  and  Azeri-Persian  bilingual  learners  of  English  regarding  their...

Processing of English Relative Clauses by Adult

The processing complexity of English relative clauses

Sentences that contain non-local dependencies between words have long been known to cause comprehension difficulty, relative to sentences where all the dependencies are local. Relative clause (RC) structures have been used extensively to evaluate hypotheses about the source of these complexity effects because different word order configurations can be compared while keeping the words the same a...

A Centering analysis of relative clauses in English and Greek