Remarks on English Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is two folds: one is to examine the controversies among the existing research over the syntactic properties of English non-Restrictive Relative Clauses (hereafter, NRRCs) as opposed to Restrictive Relative Clauses (hereafter, RRCs). Secondly, the internal structure of English NRRCs is proposed in order to accommodate the disputes from the previous research such as Quirk, et. al. (1985), Borsley (1992, 1997), Smits (1988), McCawley (1998), Lobeck (2000), Huddleston & Pullum (2008), Vries (2002, 2006), Aoun & Li (2003), Arnold (2004), and Arnold & Borsely (2008), we argue that English NRRCs, unlike RRCs, are XP-adjuncts, (contra Lobeck 2000, Aarts 2001, 2008, among others), arriving at a conclusion that NRRC involves a discontinuous constituent. Furthermore, this Wh-CP in English NRRC enters into the syntactic derivation via Sidewards movement (hereafter, SM) in the sense of Hornstein (2001, 2009) in order to eventually form a single-rooted tree. The kind of architecture we advocate for English NRRC in this study is on a par with what Newson (2006) has argued for: English RRC is an X’-Adjunct and NRRC is an XP-Adjunct. Most of the troublesome properties that have long been discussed in literature receive a new analysis under the current study. For example, the obviation of WCO effect or ‘weakest crossover’ (Lasnik & Stowell 1991) observed in English NRRC, unlike in RRCs (Authier & Reed 2005), can be straightforwardly accounted for, if the two distinct structures are to be adopted. The theoretical implication of this proposal is that there are two types of adjuncts, one is X’ adjunct and the other is XP-adjunct, contra Hornstein (2009).