Although English relative clauses have been the subject of considerable research, few quantitative studies have traced their development over an extended period of time. The present study focuses on factors governing the choice of relative markers in restrictive relative clauses with relativized subjects from the 16th century to the present day, using both spoken and written data, and including non-standard and regional varieties. The study examines claims by Romaine (1982) that the wh-strategy has not affected spoken English, and that no major qualitative changes have occurred in the relative system since the early 16th century. The results, however, show that these claims are not correct: a major event occurred in the 17th century which had a significant impact on spoken and written English. Many areas are identified which merit further research.
It has often been claimed that it-cleft complements differ syntactically from restrictive relative clauses. Alleged differences in the distribution and relative frequency of wh-forms in the two clause types are generally offered to support this view, but such claims have not been empirically verified. In this study, we examine synchronic and diachronic data for clefts and relative clauses and show that the major claims are unsupported. The diachronic data further show that cleft complements and restrictive relative clauses have changed together over time and at the same rate. On the constant rate hypothesis, the evidence supports the position that the two clause types are not syntactically distinct.
This paper describes issues in adapting the PUNDIT system, designed originally for message processing, to a query-answering system for the VOYAGER application. The resulting system, whose architecture and capabilities are described here, represents a first step towards our goal of demonstrating spoken language understanding in an interactive problem-solving context.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.