تسجيل الدخول

تسجيل

Relative clauses

المؤلف:  Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva

المصدر:  The Genesis of Grammar

الجزء والصفحة:  P224-C5

2026-03-14

308

Relative clauses

In the introduction we defined relative clauses as clauses that function as attributive modifiers of nouns (or noun phrases). In the more familiar languages, relative clauses are commonly introduced by relative clause markers or, in short, relative markers or relativizers, for example English who, which, that, etc. But they may as well involve no formal marking, for example The book I read yesterday (for a survey of the ways the relative clause construction is marked in the languages of the world, see Comrie and Kuteva 2005). Since our interest is primarily, though not exclusively, with the morphosyntax of clause subordination, we are concerned most of all with relative clauses marked by some kind of morphological expression; accordingly, we will not be able to do justice to other kinds of relative clauses. We will deal primarily with restrictive relative clauses, even if much of what we have to say also applies to non-restrictive relative clauses. Furthermore, we are confined to finite relative clauses. While most languages have them, some languages have only non-finite ones; most modern Lezgian languages, in the same way as Proto Lezgian, for example, lack finite relative clauses (Harris and Campbell 1995: 311).