The Japanese Internally-Headed Relative Clause as a Marked Head-Complement Structure

This paper proposes a new analysis of Internally-Headed Relative Clauses (IHRC) in Japanese in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) which defines IHRC in terms of the feature specification of the main predicate. IHRC is characterized as a special type of headcomplement structure, in which the predicate has highly marked ARG-ST and VAL features corresponding to IHRC. Motivated by diachronic and synchronic data, the proposed analysis also suggests a way to accommodate the constructional elusiveness of IHRC.