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The current consensus in the literature of processing of relative clauses states that centre-embedded relative clauses introduce a heavy computational load. While this is well-established, most evidence for it comes from English, while the empirical evidence from many other languages is still lacking. Here, we try to fill this gap by researching the differences in the processing times of centre-embedded and right-branching relative clauses in Slovenian. We report results from a sentence-picture matching task, in which we observe longer reaction times and lower accuracy when the participants are dealing with centre-embedded relative clauses, compared to right-branching ones. This result provides important evidence in a so far largely under-investigated language, contributing to the theoretical claim that the difficulties observed in the processing of centre-embedded relative clauses are language-independent.

I argue that the version of phrase structure theory proposed by Donati and Cecchetto (2011) falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses not only in English but crosslinguistically in general. In particular, I show that free relative clauses can be introduced not only by wh-words like what or where, which is what Donati and Cecchetto predict, but also by wh-phrases like what books or whatever books and their equivalents in other languages, which Donati and Cecchetto explicitly predict not to be possible.

Purpose Relative clauses present a well-known processing asymmetry between object-extracted and subject-extracted dependencies across both typical and atypical populations. The present study aimed at exploring the comprehension of object and subject relative clauses as conceptualized by the Relativized Minimality framework in autistic children and in a group of age- and IQ-matched typically-developing children. The study also explored the way performance in relative clauses would be affected by the children’s language and executive function skills. Method Relative clause comprehension was tested through a sentence-picture matching task and language was tested with a receptive vocabulary task. Executive functions were assessed through backward digit recall and a Flanker test. Results Object relative clauses were harder to parse for both groups than subject relatives, while number mismatch between the moved object Noun Phrase and the intervening subject Noun Phrase in object relatives boosted both groups’ performances. Typically-developing children’s performance in object relatives was predicted by both language and executive functions, while autistic children failed to use language and did not systematically draw on their executive functions in object relative clause comprehension. Conclusion The findings suggest that relative clause processing in autism follows a normal developmental trajectory, and that difficulty with parsing object relative clauses stems from reduced language and executive functions rather than deficits in the children’s morphosyntactic skills.

A Minimalist hypothesis about resumptive pronouns is that they should be no different from ordinary pronouns (McCloskey 2006). The article substantiates this hypothesis with respect to a particular view of pronouns: pronouns are \"elsewhere\" elements. Just as the interpretation of ordinary pronouns, on this view, is determined by competition with anaphors, so the interpretation of resumptive pronouns is determined by competition with gaps. On the basis of new facts in Hebrew and systematic differences between optional and obligatory pronouns, I argue that the tail of a relative clause movement chain is realized as the least specified form available. Since their interpretive properties are fully determined by external factors, resumptive pronouns must be part of the syntactic derivation, not items merged from the (traditional) lexicon.

This article investigates the structural and interpretative properties of relative clauses in Shupamem, an under-studied Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon, focusing on the integration status of non-restrictive relative clauses, an under-researched aspect of relative clause syntax. We show that non-restrictive relatives have the same properties as restrictive relatives in the language and argue that considerations relating to illocutionary independence, scope relations with matrix negation and intentional verbs, VP ellipsis, pronominalization, binding, weak crossover effects, parasitic gaps, and split antecedents, among others, support the conclusion that Shupamem non-restrictive relatives are clause-internal nominally-integrated syntactic objects, as in Italian and Mandarin Chinese. This finding supports Cinque’s (2008) discovery that non-restrictive relative clauses come in both integrated and non-integrated varieties, and typologically places Shupamem among the languages of the world that exclusively manifest the integrated non-restrictive relative clause structure.

A long-standing question in sentence processing research concerns the online parsing process in clause-boundary garden-path sentences, such as After Mary dressed John bathed . In this sentence, “John” must be parsed as the matrix subject DP but can be locally analysed as the object of the embedded verb. There is considerable evidence that the parser misanalyses these garden-path sentences. However, the controversy lies in whether the parser revises them during the online parsing process. The present study investigated this revision process through two self-paced reading experiments utilising grammatical constraints on reflexives and subject or object relative clauses embedded within the locally ambiguous DP. The results provided evidence of revision when a subject relative clause was embedded but not when an object relative clause was embedded. These findings suggest that the parser assigns grammatical structures that correspond to input strings during the revision of clause-boundary ambiguities but that object relative clauses affect the online revision process.

The present study compared two sentence–picture-matching tests in Greek, namely the Syntactic Proficiency Test and the sentence comprehension subtest of the Diagnostic Verbal Intelligence Quotient (DVIQ) battery, to assess complex sentence comprehension in 29 Greek-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Crucially, the DVIQ test included more foils and visual details than the Syntactic Proficiency Test. The study had three aims: (1) to examine sentence comprehension performance across various syntactically complex structures (passives, clitic pronouns, subject, and object relative clauses) and identify comprehension asymmetries among these types; (2) to investigate task effects on syntactic comprehension accuracy by comparing performance across the two tests; and (3) to examine differences in error types across tasks. Results showed that autistic children were significantly less accurate in their comprehension performance of passives and clitics in the DVIQ compared to the Syntactic Proficiency Test, with no difference in accuracy observed for subject or object relative clauses, which were consistently high and low, respectively, across both tests. Error patterns also differed across the two tests. More specifically, thematic role reversals in passives were more frequent in the DVIQ than the Syntactic Proficiency Test. The overall findings suggest that the DVIQ’s enhanced perceptual complexity may have affected children’s accuracy in their comprehension of passives and clitics, while object relatives were less affected by task effects because of their high structural complexity. The study highlights how visual complexity and foil count can impact syntactic comprehension in autistic children and underscores the importance of task design in assessing syntactic skills in ASD.

Research on the (in)definiteness of bare nouns has developed various proposals regarding which type-shifters exist in human language and which principles are needed to govern their distribution (Carlson 1977; Partee 1987; Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004; i.a.). At the same time, literature on headless relative clauses (HRCs), primarily focusing on free relatives (FRs) in Indo-European languages, has also developed type-shifting principles (Jacobson 1995; Caponigro 2003, 2004). The type-shifting principles from the FR literature, however, are fundamentally different than those found in proposals for bare nouns. Here, we present case studies from two Mayan languages which diverge from one another in the behavior of bare nouns, and which possess several different kinds of headless relative clauses. We show that “super-free relative clauses” (Caponigro et al. 2021; Caponigro 2022), which lack a wh-word, pattern in ways parallel to bare nouns in the respective languages. We also demonstrate that HRCs headed by a wh-word—i.e., FRs—diverge from bare nouns; they pattern similarly to one another across the languages under investigation, and in ways similar to what has been reported for FRs crosslinguistically. We provide evidence that there is a dedicated FR type-shifter (FR-ι) used as a post-syntactic mechanism to repair a type-mismatch at the CP level, building on work by Caponigro (2004). Our novel contribution is that this type-shifter is available regardless of the presence or absence of other type-shifters in a language. This paper adds new data to our understanding of the range and applicability of different definiteness-related type-shifters as well as captures certain typological tendencies regarding HRCs.

The present study investigates several linguistic factors that might be determinants of differences in the ease of acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in L2 contexts, using the acquisition of English relative clauses by Kurdish Sorani native speakers. The analysis of 1440 subject and object RCs formed by Kurdish Sorani-speaking learners of English in a sentence combination task and a sentence translation task indicates that the syntactic functions of the noun phrase (NP) relativized in the RC, the position of the RC in the matrix clause (whether centre- or right-embedded), and the properties of RCs in L1 affect the acquisition and the formation of RCs in L2. The study also provides evidence that the syntactic functions of the relativized NP in the matrix clause, and the consistency/inconsistency of word orders in L1 and L2 do not influence the acquisition of RCs in L2.

This paper pursues two inter-related goals. One goal is to compare the (de)merits of two approaches to the syntax-semantics of Japanese internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs), one developed by Alexander Grosu, Koji Hoshi, and Fred Landman in a number of earlier studies, and one proposed by Kitagawa (2019), with respect to the following issues: [i] the status of the relative clause (non-restrictive or predicate-denoting?); [ii] the status of island-constraints (absolute or subject to cross-idiolectal variation?); and [iii] the infelicitous status of IHRCs with referential IHs (absolute or subject to cross-idiolectal variation?). The paper argues: [a] that the relative clause of an IHRC is predicate-denoting, and [b] that the cross-linguistic variation observed in relation to island-constraints and the (in)felicity of IHRCs with referential IHs is due to the existence of an alternative parse for prima facie IHRCs with referential IHs, in particular, as a special variety of doubly-headed relative constructions (DHRCs). The second goal, which grows out of the need to construct the supporting argumentation for [b], is to establish which properties of DHRCs are shared by IHRCs and which are not, and to construct an explicit compositional analysis of DHRCs that captures this state of affairs. To the best of our knowledge, a compositional analysis of Japanese DHRCs has never been attempted in the earlier literature.