A controversy in the sentence processing literature regarding relative-clause processing was raised by Hsiao and Gibson’s (2003) study of Chinese relative clauses. Their study suggested that, contrary to the patterns found in all other languages, Chinese relative clauses showed a processing preference for object extractions. This result posed a challenge to sentence processing theories that att...

in this paper, we examine the treatment of persian relative clauses in role and reference grammar. rrg is a structural-functional theory which has studied the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface in human language systems. the main objectives of this article, on the one hand, are to elucidate syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of farsi relative clauses, and on the other hand, to asse...

Kim, Jong-Bok. 2012. On the Syntax of the It-Cleft Construction: A Construction-based Perspective. Linguistic Research 29(1), 45-68. The English it-cleft construction displays ambivalent structural properties: restrictive relative clause and non-relative clause properties. This paper reviews its main grammatical properties and then sketches a uniform analysis for different types of the construc...

This paper presents an analysis of a family of particular English constructions, all of which roughly express "purpose". In particular we look at the purpose clause, rationale .clause, and infinitival relative clause. We (1) show that couching the analysis in a computational framework, specifically generation, provides a more satisfying account than analyses based strictly on descriptive lingui...

A series of self-paced reading time experiments was performed to assess how characteristics of noun phrases (NPs) contribute to the difference in processing difficulty between objectand subject-extracted relative clauses. Structural semantic characteristics of the NP in the embedded clause (definite vs. indefinite and definite vs. generic) did not influence the magnitude of the processing diffi...

Although a large literature demonstrates that object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject-extracted (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well how best explain these effects. An eye-tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017) demonstrated readers experience more at the matrix verb for ORCs SRCs when ...

This paper concerns itself with the superlative morpheme -est and its ability to license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) such as any or ever, and in particular the compositional analysis of a puzzling type of utterance which incorporates these grammatical elements. Specifically, an embedded clause structure which appears at first glance to be a restrictive relative clause modifier will be argued...