appositive relative clauses

[Nigel Vincent]

Lutz,
You're right of course that in English, Swedish, Danish and elsewhere we have
the type, sometimes called a contact relative, in which there is no overt
marker of relative clause status, but as far as I am aware the crucial 
property
of these is that they are always restrictive - i.e. they serve to pick out a
specific subset of the set identified by the head noun. Moreover even when
there is no relativizer there is a dependency between the head noun and an
argument or adjunct in the relative clause.
I guess my query to you is a hypothesis that in an appositive (or 
appositional)
construction there would be nothing to make us want to call it a relative if
there wasn't a relative pronoun or complementizer present. If I try to imagine
what such an example would look like, I keep having to insert an overt 
argument
to keep track of what's going on - perhaps something like 'Bill, the 
boss fired
him, was upset' and then I get very close to a parenthetical. But maybe 
this is
just me being anglo (or north/west Germanic) -centric.
Wolfgang's examples in his second post are very interesting but still
restrictive rather than appositional in the traditional sense, at least to
judge by the translations, so I'd agree with him that we need a 
different term.
Best,
Nigel

Quoting Lutz Gunkel <gunkel at ids-mannheim.de>:

> Nigel wrote:
>
>> Indeed my question to Lutz would be: if an appositive relative doesn't have
> a relative pronoun or particle why would we want to call it a relative in
> the first place?
>
> OK. But what about languages where the relative pronoun or particle is
> optional under certain circumstances. In English and Swedish, for instance,
> the relative particle may be omitted in sentences such as (i)
>
> (i) Money (that) you have in the bank yields interest.
>
> Given that we find structures like (i) with *restrictive* relatives in some
> language, is it conceivable that we would find a corresponding structure
> with *appositive* relatives (in the sense of restrictive and appositive
> indicated by Nigel)?
>
> Best,
>
> Lutz
>



-- 
Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA
Associate Vice-President for Graduate Education


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