displaced relative clause

[Laurence Horn]

There is a somewhat lengthy literature on "extraposed relative clauses" or "relative clause extraposition" from the mid-1970s into the 1980s focusing on the conditions under which it's likely and unlikely to occur.  One observation was that for many speakers these sound better with indefinites than definites, as seen in pairs like

A woman who was carrying a red parasol came in
A woman came in who was carrying a red parasol
The woman who was carrying a red parasol came in
?The woman came in who was carrying a red parasol

And the predicate also played into it, so there's a contrast for some speakers between

A woman came into the room who was carrying a red parasol
(?)A woman went out of the room who was carrying a red parasol

Various explanations were offered involving information structure (the extraposed relative having to be "presentational" or "asserted" in the relevant sense).  No dialectal restrictions were discussed as far as I can remember.  (Yael Ziv and Peter Cole were among those who worked on these, and there's at least one CLS paper on the topic, but I'm in Holland and my CLS volumes aren't.)

LH


On Jul 1, 2012, at 10:45 PM, Michael Newman wrote:

> Ok, two of you find it ok. Maybe I'm over analyzing, but I think I'd say it with the relative right after the modified N.
>
>
>
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> Michael Newman
> Associate Professor of Linguistics
> Queens College/CUNY
> michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu
>
>
>
> On Jul 1, 2012, at 10:15 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: displaced relative clause
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Sounds normal to me too.
>>
>> JL
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>> -----------------------
>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>>> Subject:      Re: displaced relative clause
>>>
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Michael Newman
>>> <michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu> wrote:
>>>> African American English
>>>
>>> That's true. I'm not even sure what it is that you find abnormal about
>>> that string.
>>>
>>> OTOH, I'd write
>>>
>>> "African-American"
>>>
>>> or, simply,
>>>
>>> "BE."
>>>
>>> BTW, y'all know that there's a Facebook SIG with the name,
>>>
>>> "Don't Call Me 'African-American'!"?
>>>
>>> --
>>> -Wilson
>>> -----
>>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
>>> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>>> -Mark Twain
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
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