Untitled

Gur (or Mabia) languages which are spoken in West Africa have so-called internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs), but they have not received serious attention in syntactic and typological research on IHRCs. In this article, building on detailed first-hand data, we describe the syntax and semantics of IHRCs in five Gur languages: Buli, Dagaare, Dagbani, Gurene, and Kabiyé. It is demonstrated that their IHRCs refute the syntactic and semantic generalizations proposed in the literature (Gorbet 1976;Cole 1987;Grosu 2002;Watanabe 1991;. We also compare IHRCs in Gur and Japanese and argue that the existing semantic typology of IHRCs must be reconsidered, showing that properties of two types of IHRCs-restrictive and maximalizing IHRCS-do not necessarily show predicated correlations.

Section: Existential Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparative syntax of internally-headed relative clauses in Gur

Hiraiwa

Akanlig-Pare

Atintono

et al. 2017

“…[A] In contrast to earlier approaches, both those that rely on E-type anaphora (e.g., Hoshi 1995;Shimoyama 1999;2001;Kim 2007) and those that rely on null operator movement cum lambda abstraction over the operator's "trace" (Watanabe 1992;Grosu 2010;Grosu & Landman 2012;Landman 2016), E&G propose that internally-headed relative constructions (henceforth: IHRCs), can have, in addition to the kind of denotation attributed to them in all the above studies, an additional one, which is crucially based on contextual salience, and which those earlier studies do not capture. These readings may be illustrated in relation to the following context, which E&G graphically illustrate as in (1) (=E&G's (3)): there are twelve apples on a tray, and Ayaka peels three of them.…”

Section: Introductory Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the unified analysis of three types of relative clause construction in Japanese, and on the “salient reading” of the internally headed type. A reply to Erlewine & Gould (2016)

Grosu

Hoshi

2018

In this reply, we argue against two proposals made by Erlewine & Gould (2016), and in favor of the following two theses:[i] Japanese internally headed relative constructions disallow an interpretation that is crucially based on contextual salience, and allow only an interpretation that reflects the content of their (explicit or implicit) internal head(s).[ii] None of Erlewine & Gould’s attempts to provide independent support for their unified analysis of internally headed, externally headed and doubly headed relative constructions of Japanese is tenable. Therefore, these writers failed to provide convincing justification for abandoning the approach developed by Grosu & Landman (2012) and Landman (2016) with respect to the analysis of the internally headed relatives of Japanese, an approach which moreover yielded explicit accounts of two types of data for which Erlewine & Gould have no obvious analysis.

“…Once some individual is picked out, pragmatic knowledge will come into play and the whole logical structure will be judged to make sense or not, depending on whether or not the resulting truth-conditions agree with our knowledge of the world. As noted, there are two important E-type analyses of Japanese IHRCs, Shimoyama (1999;2001) and Kim (2007). For the purpose of this paper, there is one critical difference between them.…”

Section: Cospecificationmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…I maintain that, for Japanese IHRCs, the relevant discourse structure is defined in terms of theta relation. Following Shimoyama (1999;2001), I take the following points to be obvious: (i) the antecedent (IH) must be internal to the IHR; (ii) the IH must bear a thematic role within an eventuality described by the IHR; (iii) it is "in contrast to discourses, where the antecedent needs not be in the sentence that immediately precedes the anaphor"; and (iv) the antecedent needs not be explicitly present in earlier discourse at all. 6 Grosu (2010: 234) correctly points out that Shimoyama's (1999) and Kim's (2007) E-type anaphora analyses "are constructed in a way that enables them to deal only with situations where the IH is in the highest clause of the relative."…”

Section: Cospecificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is no complex DP in English with the exact semantic properties of Japanese IHRC (as amply noted in the literature; see, e.g., Grosu & Landman 2012), and we thus content ourselves with a fluent translation […] that makes use of E-type anaphora, the IH serving as antecedent of a definite anaphor. In so doing, we follow the practice adopted by Shimoyama (1999;2001), without, however, adopting her theoretical analysis of IHRCs, which made direct use of the E-type strategy used in discourse […]. These reasonably felicitous examples, though certainly subject to idiosyncratic variation, contradict G&H's claim (45b).…”

Section: How Repairs Are Donementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The <i>pro</i>-head analysis of the Japanese internally-headed relative clause

Kitagawa

2019

The objective of this paper is two-fold. One is to advance the view (call it the pro-head analysis) that the so-called internally-headed relative clause (IHRC) in Japanese is a nonrestrictive relative clause whose external head position is occupied by pro functioning as an E-type pronoun. It demonstrates that this view provides a natural framework in terms of which sundry and significant phenomena associated with Japanese IHRCs can be accounted for, including their characteristic properties contrasting with the corresponding change relatives and the doubly-headed relatives. The pro-head analysis contradicts a currently popular claim propagated by a series of papers that rely on null operator movement leading to the thesis that: (i) Japanese IHRCs may exhibit a "change sub-variety" (i.e., "Change IHRC") that is not reducible to gapless externally light-headed relatives; (ii) Japanese IHRCs are strictly island-sensitive; and (iii) they disallow definite referential semantic heads. The other objective of this paper, therefore, is to present this long overdue challenge by arguing that their claims (i) ~ (iii) are not empirically sustainable, although their claim (iii) presents some difficult issues that defy clear-cut treatment as yet.