Ni, Crain, and Shankweiler (1996) present evidence to suggest that the focus operator only can guide how reduced relative clause sentences are initially parsed. In this paper, we demonstrate that this does not hold for relative clause sentences that start with a nounphrase, verb, noun-phrase construction. We repor t an eye movement study in which subjects read reduced and unreduced sentences of...

It is well known that sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses (e.g., The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error) are more difficult to comprehend than sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (e.g., The reporter that attacked the senator admitted the error). Two major accounts of this phenomenon make different predictions about where, in the course o...

ing over the relative tense inside the subordinate (marked) clause produces a property of times that can combine with the main (unmarked) clause through set intersection (or predicate modification; Heim & Kratzer 1998:65), as long as it is adjoined low enough to combine with another property of times. This is much like the semantic composition of a temporal adjunct clause (see, for instance, vo...

It is widely accepted that the split between restrictive and nonrestrictive relatives generally coincides with their asymmetric contribution to discourse: restrictive relatives contribute content that is part of the main assertion of the sentence, while nonrestrictive relatives contribute content that is backgrounded or supplementary to the content of the main clause. Recent studies (Huddleston...

A restrictive relative clause is one that "determines and restricts the extension of the head", as opposed to a non-restrictive (or descriptive) relative clause, which "merely gives some additional explanation of it" (GREN-EKLUND 1978:53), e.g. "the families that have a car could offer other families a ride to the outing" as opposed to "my father, who has a car, offered another family a ride to...

This paper investigates the development of relative clauses in the speech of one German-speaking child aged 2 ; 0 to 5 ; 0. The earliest relative clauses we found in the data occur in topicalization constructions that are only a little different from simple sentences: they contain a single proposition, express the actor prior to other participants, assert new information and often occur with ma...