Resumptive restrictive relatives: A crosslinguistic perspective

Abstract

One of the aims of linguistic theory is to account for language variation. This article contributes to that objective by examining resumptive restrictive relative clauses crosslinguistically. The major claims are (1) the core-grammar distinction between conventional and resumptive restrictive relatives is due to the feature composition of the relative complementizer; (2) the prohibition against pied-piping that some languages adhere to correlates with the lack of lexical relative pronouns; (3) particular grammars need to accommodate language-specific properties such as preferences for which elements may, must, or cannot acquire a phonological matrix; and (4) resumptive pronouns which appear in relatives in the absence of an island are inserted at PF for other than interpretive reasons.