Internally-headed relative clauses in sign languages

Abstract

This chapter considers relative clause data from sign languages in light of their variation with respect to basic word order, nonmanual marking, and presence/absence of internally-headed and externally-headed relative clauses. Syntactically, a double merge cartographic model (Cinque 2005a; b), following Brunelli (2011), is adopted. The differences across sign languages are suggested to result from differences in raising requirements with respect to the relative clauses themselves and with respect to their heads, rather than basic word order, use of complementizers, relative pronouns, or nominalizers, or (type of) nonmanual marking. Typologically, it is noted that several of the SVO SLs have IHRCs, that at least one SOV SL does not have IHRCs, and that three of the SLs have both internally-headed (IHRCs) and externally-headed (EHRCs) relative clauses.This article is part of the special collection: Internally-headed Relative Clauses

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