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A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers

  • Jinlu Liu ORCID logo und Haitao Liu ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 17. Dezember 2021

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.


Corresponding author: Haitao Liu, Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Zijingang Campus, No. 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China; and Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China, E-mail:

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).


Received: 2020-11-07
Accepted: 2021-05-04
Published Online: 2021-12-17

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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