Abstract
Object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) can occur in English either with a lexical complementizer or with no complementizer. This paper seeks to investigate constraints on when the complementizer is lexicalized in ORCs, within the theoretical framework of dependency grammar. In an analysis of one hundred ORCs, we find that: (a) the mean dependency distance (MDD) of lexicalized ORCs is longer significantly than that of non-lexicalized ORCs; (b) there is no significant difference in mean hierarchical distance (MHD) for lexicalized versus non-lexicalized ORCs; and (c) hierarchical number (HN) influences mean hierarchical distance significantly, and when HN is 1, the MHD of lexicalized ORCs is significantly longer than that of non-lexicalized ORCs. However, there are no significant difference when HN is 2–5, indicating that HN = 1 may be a key point in the ellipsis of relativizers.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments on our present paper.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0020).
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