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...

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...

In this paper I propose a new analysis of the English cleft in which the cleft clause is a restrictive relative clause adjoined to the clefted XP. I provide evidence showing that both ‘matching’ and ‘raising’ derivations are possible, that the initial it of clefts is not an expletive, and that the cleft clause undergoes obligatory extraposition to VP. Taken together, this evidence favours the p...