Extraposed relative clauses in Role and Reference Grammar. An analysis using Tree Wrapping Grammars

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of extraposed relative clauses in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), adopting its formalization as a tree rewriting grammar, specifically as a Tree Wrapping Grammar (TWG). Extraposed relative clauses are a puzzle since the link to the antecedent noun can be rather non-local but it seems nevertheless appropriate to model it as a syntactic dependency and not a purely anaphoric relation. Moreover, certain types of determiners require their NP to be modified by a (possibly extraposed) relative clause, and any comprehensive framework should account for this. We show that the tree wrapping operation of TWG, which is conventionally used to fill argument slots out of which some elements have been extracted, can be used to model extraposed relative clauses. The analysis accounts for the non-locality of the phenomenon while capturing the link to the antecedent NP in a local way (i.e., within a single elementary tree).