Abstract: Abstract Free (or headless) relative clauses (FRs) have attracted considerable attention. The main reason is that they look like clauses but act as if their clause‐initial wh ‐element or ‐phrase were the head. One way of looking at this is to say that the wh ‐phrase is “shared” by the relative clause and the matrix clause. This intuitive notion immediately raises serious questions for central principles of syntactic theory such as the Theta Criterion: if the wh ‐phrase is truly shared, then it would have to be assigned one theta‐role from the relative clause predicate and another one from the matrix clause, thereby violating the Theta Criterion. Similar problems arise when we consider various matching phenomena such as case matching: the wh ‐element must be able to morphologically satisfy the case requirements of both the relative clause and the matrix clause. There are, of course, ways to circumvent such problems. The Theta Criterion problem would go away if we assumed that in addition to the wh ‐element in the complementizer position of the relative clause, there is in addition a silent nominal head above it. But on the other hand such a solution creates problems for matching phenomena: why should there be a matching requirement if there are two positions, one for each case? These and other remarkable properties of FRs have given rise to numerous interesting theoretical proposals, through the most important of which this chapter will guide the reader.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-11-22
Language: en
Type: other
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 9
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