Why subject relatives prevail: Constraints versus constructional licensing

Abstract

Relative clauses containing subject relative-pronouns (e.g. that go to Utah all the time) are the prevalent type both across languages (Keenan and Comrie, Linguistic Inquiry 8: 63–69, 1977) and in conversation, accounting for 65% of relative clauses in the American National Corpus (Reali and Christiansen, Journal of Memory and Language 53: 1–23, 2007) and 67% of relative clauses in the corpus examined for this study, the Switchboard corpus. This fact appears attributable to parsing preferences, as per Hawkins (Language 75: 244–285, 1999, Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004), Gibson (Cognition 68: 1–76, 1998) and Gibson et al. (Cognitive Linguistics 16: 313–353, 2005): subject extractions are the most local filler-gap dependency and therefore impose the lowest burden on short-term memory. This explanation, however, not only lacks strong psycholinguistic support but also fails to explain a major pattern in Switchboard: subject relatives are not preferred across the board but only as modifiers of postverbal (object and oblique) nominals. We propose that the preference for subject relatives is an effect not of general-purpose interpretive or encoding constraints but rather of constructional licensing: the subject relative belongs to an entrenched syntactic routine, the Presentational Relative construction, e.g. I have friends that clip articles (McCawley, Lingua 53: 99–149, 1981; Lambrecht, Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French, John Benjamins, 1987, There was a farmer had a dog: Syntactic amalgams revisited: 319–33, 1988, Topic, focus, and secondary predication: The French presentational relative construction, John Benjamins, 2002). We investigate this hypothesis by examining the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties of relative-clause modifiers of postverbal nominals in the Switchboard corpus.