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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 45:4 (2021) ► pp.921–937

Light-headed relative clauses in Teramano

ORCID logo | California State University, Dominguez Hills
| University of California San Diego

We investigate an unstudied, rich component of the relative clause system in Teramano, one of the Upper Southern Italian languages. We focus on light-headed relative clauses – relative clauses that lack a full nominal head and are introduced by only a Determiner-like or pronominal “light head”. We also briefly describe headed relative clauses in Teramano since the morphosyntactic features they exhibit are relevant for the investigation of light-headed relative clauses. Last, we highlight commonalities and differences between light-headed relative clauses in Teramano and Italian. Our paper provides the first systematic in-depth description of light-headed relative clauses in an Upper Southern Italian language that we are aware of, contributes to the knowledge of Teramano, the study of light-headed relative clauses crosslinguistically, and the ongoing investigation of microvariation among Italian and Italian languages.

Keywords: headed relative clauses, light-headed relative clauses, Upper Southern Italian, Teramano, Abruzzese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Teramano basics and headed relative clauses
    • 2.1Teramano basics
    • 2.2Headed relative clauses in Teramano
  • 3.Light-headed relative clauses in Teramano
    • 3.1Light-headed relative clauses with a pronominal head
    • 3.2Light-headed relative clauses with a demonstrative light head
    • 3.3Light-headed Relative Clauses with a quantificational light head
    • 3.4Light-headed Relative Clauses with an adverbial light head
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 9 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.20037.man
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