This article scrutinizes the diachrony of relativizers and complement clause subordinators in Russian, Polish, and Czech. Historical morphology indicates a development from agreeing relative pronouns via noninflected relativizers to complement clause subordinators. This concurs with recent findings on Germanic (Axel-Tober 2017), but contradicts more traditional proposals that derive subordinators from demonstratives. The respective syntactic reanalyses are demonstrated on diachronic Slavic corpus data. Moreover, a quantitative comparison of sixteenth- to seventeenth- century East Slavic texts with and without West Slavic interference suggests that the use of kotoryj ‘which’ as a relative pronoun spread into Russian as an inner-Slavic contact-induced change.

We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems. Hawkins (2014) and others who have advanced this idea focus primarily on parsing. Our extension focuses on production, and we use that to explore explanations for certain subject/object asymmetries in extraction structures. The phenomenon we examine, which we term the mirror asymmetry, runs in opposite directions for within-clause and across-clause (long-distance) extraction, showing a preference for subject extraction in the former and for object extraction in the latter. We review several types of evidence suggesting that the mirror asymmetry and related phenomena are best explained by an account of the formation of grammars that assigns an important role to properties of sentence planning in production.

It is standardly assumed that the German declarative dass-complementizer evolved from the demonstrative pronoun (Old High German thaz) used cataphorically. On this analysis, the source structure would be a paratactic sequence of two sentences in which thaz occurred in the final position of the first clause and pointed forward to the content of the second clause. Out of this structure, thaz developed into a subordinate conjunction/complementizer via a shift of the clause boundary (as in Mary knows that: Peter is lying → Mary knows that Peter is lying). This article takes issue with the standard assumption and puts forward an alternative account in which the declarative complementizer developed from a correlative construction (as in Mary knows that, that Peter is lying). The correlative construction (arguably also with an optionally silent correlative) is robustly attested in the old Germanic and old Indo-European languages. The source structure was thus not a sequence of syntactically independent clauses, but a hypotactic structure with an explicative relative clause associated with a silent correlative element in the main clause. In line with the hypothesis currently under discussion—that apparent noun-complement clauses are in fact relative clauses—it is argued that the explicative clause in the correlative structure was a relative clause, and thus the declarative complementizer developed from the relative complementizer thaz. The syntactic reanalyses involved in this new scenario are far less radical than in the traditional one. The new scenario is furthermore supported by crosslinguistic evidence: the development of relativizers into complementizers is a frequently attested grammaticalization path.

This paper revisits the restrictive/appositive distinction with Mandarin relative clauses and argues against the commonly held view that their restrictive/appositive status directly correlates with their structural positions. We demonstrate that distinct uses of demonstratives constitute a relevant factor in establishing the correlation, such that the pre-/post-demonstrative position is relevant to the semantic status of a relative when the demonstrative is used deictically, but not when it is used anaphorically; and that this refined typology of RCs can be accounted for once existing analyses of strong definites (Elbourne 2005. Situations and individuals; Schwarz 2009. Two types of definites in natural language; Jenks 2018. Linguistic Inquiry 49. 501–536) are extended to Mandarin demonstratives.

The aim of this study is to investigate how pragmatic-conceptual representations can be integrated into theories of first language acquisition. Experiment 1, using a sentence–picture judgment task, examined how children (N = 53, aged 4–6 years) used prosody boundaries as cues for a recursive interpretation when the recursive relatives (i.e., SO and OO)1 were garden path structures. The results showed that children below six-year had a stronger preference for recursive reading than adults under the conjunction-biased prosody condition and that children after six years of birth exhibited an adult-like preference for recursive readings under the recursion-biased prosody condition. Experiment 2 explored whether and how reversibility (e.g., “a dog eats a banana” vs “a dog kisses a cat”) in the action schema affected the production of OO and SO in Mandarin-speaking children (N = 137, age: 4–8 years). The results showed that adult-like production of OO in both reversible and irreversible conditions appeared at the age of six. The adult-like production ability of SO showed a one-year delay in the reversible condition (seven years under the reversible condition versus six years under the irreversible condition). The study suggests that some pragmatic-conceptual representations (such as the action schema) may be precursors of language and serve as a default analysis in language acquisition, while the mapping of the prosody domain onto syntax matures over time.

Aoun and Li (2003) argued that whether the head of Chinese relative clauses can reconstruct at Logical Form is determined by its phrasal category. When the head is a noun phrase, it can reconstruct; but when it is a quantifier phrase, it cannot. This paper uses a sentence-picture matching experiment to investigate this claim. The results showed that a quantifier phrase can reconstruct. Thus, we do not need to stipulate a noun phrase/quantifier phrase distinction for the reconstruction of heads in Chinese relative clauses. Both types of phrases can reconstruct, predicted by the head-raising analysis of relative clauses.

It is well-known that native English speakers sometimes erroneously accept subject-verb agreement violations when there is a number-matching attractor (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were…). Whether bilinguals whose L1 lacks number agreement are prone to such interference is unclear, given previous studies that report conflicting findings using different structures, participant groups, and experimental designs. To resolve the conflict, we examined highly proficient Korean–English bilinguals’ susceptibility to agreement attraction, comparing prepositional phrase (PP) and relative clause (RC) modifiers in a speeded acceptability judgment task and a speeded forced-choice comprehension task. The bilinguals’ judgments revealed attraction with RCs but not with PPs, while reaction times indicated attraction with both structures. The results therefore showed L2 attraction in all measures, with the consistent exception of judgments for PPs. We argue that this supports an overall native-like agreement processing mechanism, augmented by an additional monitoring mechanism that filters explicit judgments in simple structures.

Despite a vast literature on Yiddish relative clauses, their linguistic and geographical aspects have often been neglected. Based on data from the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (JCAAJ), the areal distribution of subject and oblique relative clauses is analyzed for the first time. I show that vos ‘that; what’, which also introduces non-relative complement clauses, is the most common element to introduce subject relative clauses, whereas in oblique relative clauses, the pronoun velx- ‘which’ predominates. This contrast suggests a division of labor between nonpronominal and pronominal elements depending on the syntactic role of the relativized NP. As to the areal aspect, vos accompanied by a resumptive personal pronoun is primarily used in Central Eastern and Southeastern Yiddish, whereas nonrelative comple-mentizing vos is typical of Southeastern and central Northeastern Yiddish. These areal distributions mirror patterns of coterritorial Slavic languages: The more widespread use of nonrelative complementizing vos is reminiscent of the corresponding use of Ukrainian ščo and Belarusian što ‘what; that’, whereas the preference for resumptive personal pronouns is observed in Polish and Ukrainian. Comparatively recent convergence with Slavic seems to play a role in the emergence of resumptive pronouns and nonrelative complementizing vos in the varieties of Yiddish.*

This paper studies the structure and origin of prenominal and postnominal restrictive relative clauses in Pharasiot Greek. Though both patterns are finite and introduced by the invariant complementizer tu, they differ in two important respects. First, corpus data reveal that prenominal relatives are older than their postnominal counterparts. Second, in the present-day language only prenominal relatives involve a matching derivation, whereas postnominal ones behave like Head-raising structures. Turning to diachrony, we suggest that prenominal relatives came into being through morphological fusion of a determiner t- with an invariant complementizer u. This process entailed a reduction of functional structure in the left periphery of the relative clause, to the effect that the landing site for a raising Head was suppressed, leaving a matching derivation as the only option. Postnominal relatives are analyzed as borrowed from Standard Modern Greek. Our analysis corroborates the idea that both raising and matching derivations for relatives must be acknowledged, sometimes even within a single language.