Results from two self-paced reading experiments in English are reported in which subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs, respectively) were presented in contexts that support both types of relative clauses (RCs). Object-extracted versions were read more slowly than subject-extracted versions across both experiments. These results are not consistent with a decay-based work...

This study investigates the use of relative clauses in French children's narrative monologues. Narrative texts were collected from French-speaking monolinguals in four age groups (five, seven, ten years and adults). Twenty subjects from each group were asked to tell a story based on a picture book consisting of twenty-four images without text (Frog, Where are you?). Relative constructions were ...

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...

In this paper we present some results stemming from a British Academy funded grant,1 the objective of which was to determine the extent of dialect variation in relative clause constructions in Scottish Gaelic and to provide a theoretical explanation for the structures discovered. The more theoretical outcomes of the project are reported in Adger and Ramchand (2002) and Adger and Ramchand (2005)...

The present response time study investigated how a hypothesized time-based working memory constraint of 2-3 s affects the resolution of grammatical and semantic dependencies. Congruent and incongruent object relative (OR) and subject relative sentences were read at different presentation rates so that the distance between dependent words was either shorter or longer than 2-3 s. Incongruent OR s...

Malagasy, spoken throughout Madagascar, is a Western Austronesian language with a characteristically rich voice system. In this paper we show first how to derive and compositionally interpret nuclear clauses built from verbs in different voices. They are directly projected from verbal affixes, not derived by A or A′ movement. Theta role assignment follows explicitly from semantic interpretation...

Japanese has both head-external and head-internal relative clauses (HERC & HIRC). Example (1a) shows a standard HERC. In contrast, the HIRC in (1b) has the form of an independent sentence, the bold-faced head occurring inside the relative, and it is followed by the complementizer -no and a case morpheme that relates the internal head to the matrix verb. A core question is what the interpretatio...

Definitions that children provide can be a valuable measure of their syntax, and specifically, of their ability to produce relative-clauses. This research explored the acquisition of subject-, object-, and indirect-object-relative clauses in 121 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;5-8;6. The children were asked to define 14 nouns, and their responses were collected and analyzed for various syntacti...

Based on the definition of the relative clause from Song (2001), this paper examines the relative clause in the Hui’an dialect from four parameters: (a) the relativization marker used; (b) the position of the head noun relative to the restricting clause; (c) the role and encoding of the head noun in the restricting clause; and (d) the role and encoding of the head noun in the main clause. The H...