Abstract This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The gr...

Although both sentences in (1) and (2) contain a displaced element (e.g. the cat), the two structures differ as to the position of the gap inside the relative clause. In subject relative clauses such as (1), the position which the filler moves from is the syntactic subject of the relative clause (e.g. ‘the cat chases the mouse’). By contrast, in object relative clauses like (2), the filler is m...

A computer grammar is described which includes most of the English relative-clause constructions. It is written in the form of a left-to-right phrase-structure grammar with discontinuous constituents and subscripts, which carry such syntactic restrictions as number and verb government category. The motivation for the hierarchy of syntactic choices and for the use of discontinuous constituents i...

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...

Some interpersonal verbs, such as admire and amaze, describe an action or property of one person (the reactor) that is necessarily a response to an action or property of another (the initiator). We hypothesized that these verbs make the initiator relatively more accessible in a comprehender's discourse model and that this change in relative accessibility aids identification of the referent of a...