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- Author or Editor: Nataša Milićević x
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The puzzling syntax of free relative clauses (FRs) has been the subject of substantive linguistic work. The core issue, which has divided the field, has been to determine whether this type of relative clause is a complex DP whose head is a wh-pronoun or a wh-clause without the overt external head. Lately, some theoretical reconsiderations of the nature of phrase structuring or, more precisely, of the nature of the syntactic operation Merge allowed for a fresh start in this matter. In this paper, I will follow the proposal put forward by Riemsdijk (2006b) that FRs are structurally ambiguous and that they are derived through grafting, a special type of Merge. As the relevant data in Serbian show, this—still unorthodox, though theoretically legitimate—move is also empirically sound. It also provides us with a new insight into another related phenomenon in this language—the optionality of clitic placement in FRs. The analysis will also reinterpret the status of the particle god typically occurring in this type of clauses, showing why it could be viewed as a complementizer.
A rather standard generalization regarding both clausal and nominal appositives to noun phrases is that the appositive element needs to be right adjacent to its antecedent/anchor (cf. Potts 2003). The exceptions to the adjacency requirement are usually restricted to the cases of extraposition (cf. de Vries 2002 for Dutch; Cinque 2006 for Italian). In some languages, however, such as Serbian or Old English, it is possible to split the antecedent and the appositive without resorting to extraposition. Our claim is that in such cases the observed discontinuity is the result of the leftward movement of the antecedent to a higher position in the clause. We discuss the interpretative and syntactic restrictions on this operation, basing our conclusions on the data from Serbian and Old English. We show that the leftward movement account of this phenomenon is not only the most optimal one, but provides a strong argument in favour of treating appositions as specifying conjuncts, as proposed by de Vries (2002; 2006), rather than noun phrase adjuncts.
