Are there different kinds of appositive relative clauses?
In his latest book on relative clauses, Cinque claims that there are two fundamentally different kinds of
appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses. The unintegrated ones are the typical English type, the integrated ones are found
in various languages, including Chinese and Japanese. This second type shares some characteristics with restrictive relatives, and
seems to require a different syntactic analysis. Some languages, like Italian, supposedly have both types. A list of a dozen
criteria differentiates the two, such as the use of relative pronouns and the possibility of heavy pied piping. However, when we
carefully look at Dutch and other languages, the picture starts to blur considerably, and an abundance of (micro)variation shows
up. This is problematic. I argue that the suggested criteria do not add up to two natural classes at all and are in fact
non-explanatory. Therefore, we need to focus on what is truly fundamental to non-restrictiveness, which leads to a different
perspective on the matter.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction and background
- 2.Non-restrictive relative clauses in Dutch
- Illocutionary independence
- RC split across discourse (and possibly speakers)
- Split antecedent
- Retention of internal head and non-identical internal head
- Non-Nominal antecedent
- Coordinated wh
- Heavy pied piping
- Parasitic gap
- Reflexive antecedent
- 3.Discussion and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References (24)
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