Children’s comprehension difficulties with object relative clauses (ORs) seem reduced when the embedded subject is a pronoun, rather than lexical noun. The intervention locality account explains this facilitation in terms of mismatch features between head OR and intervening pronominal subject, namely N feature according to some (Friedmann et al. 2009), or finer-grained phi others (Bentea & ...

Goal and Background: This paper provides evidence that Hocąk (Siouan) has direct modification, contra Helmbrecht’s (2004) claim that all adjectives in Hocąk are indirect modifiers. The data also show that lack of rigid ordering is not a reliable diagnostic for indirect modification (contra Cinque 2010). Following Sproat and Shih (1991), Cinque (2010) argues that indirect modification is higher,...

This paper is concerned with a particular kind of Korean relative clause constructions that contain possessive specifier gaps, as opposed to complement or adjunct gaps. Those relative clauses have been known to violate Ross's Complex NP Constraint, and various attempts have been made to account for the apparent island violations. This paper argues that those relative clauses have possessive spe...

This paper is about the relationship between dative case and the indirect object, i.e. about the linking between a morphological case and a grammatical role. The primary evidence is taken from relative clause data in German dialects (two other continental West Germanic varieties, Yiddish and a North Frisian dialect, are taken into account as well). The typical morphological systems of some of t...

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...

A reduced relative—main clause ambiguity occurs in sentences that begin with reduced relative clauses, as in The hangman executed by the government was convicted of treason. This ambiguity has often been the focus of research designed to investigate the processes by which syntactic structures are built during sentence comprehension. Reading time differences between more difficult and less diffi...

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 main-c...