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Notes
The following abbreviations are used: 1,2,3=person markers; acc=accusative; add=additive particle, aor=aorist; comp=complementizer, cop=copula; dat=dative; dem=demonstrative; erg=ergative; fut=future; gen=genitive; ins=instrumental; nom=nominative; nonact=non-active; obj=object marker; past.imperf=past imperfective; pl=plural; pres=present; prev=perfectivizing preverb; sbjv=subjunctive; sg=singular; subj=subject marker. Note that the morphological decomposition of Georgian verbs is simplified in this work to ease the presentation. The Georgian data unless otherwise indicated represents the intuition of one of the authors. Most examples have been further confirmed with several native speakers in Tbilisi.
A note on our terminology: an externally headed relative structure consists of an NP “head” and the relative clause. An internally headed relative clause will lack an external NP “head” and will instead have an internal NP “head.” Correlative structures will consist of a correlative clause and a main clause with a correlate DP. The correlative clause itself may contain an internal head or not. We will refer to correlative clauses without an overt internal head as gapped relative clauses. Often the distinction between externally headed/internally head/correlative clauses will not be relevant and we will just refer to them as rom relative clauses. The term head is semantically overloaded—in addition to the “head” of a relative clause structure, we also have the phrase structure notion of head versus phrase and the movement notion of the head versus tail of a chain. All three notions are commonly used and we will continue to do so but to keep the distinctions clear we will consistently provide disambiguating language. The relative clause “head” will always be the NP head/head NP/internal head/external head, the phrase structure “head” will always be the head of XP/Xhead, and the movement “head” will be the head of a chain.
The non-initiality requirement applies to adverbial clauses also.
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(i)
We do not discuss further the non-initiality requirement on rom in relativization structures but offer a comment from a reviewer who notes that this parallel with relative clauses is not unexpected given that many adverbial clauses are structurally relative clauses, involving movement dependences similar to other relative clauses; see Foley (2013) for a synchronic syntactic analysis. Harris (1994) provides a diachronic explanation for the non-initiality requirement on rom. She takes relative clauses that use the relative pronoun (e.g. romeli ‘which’) as historically prior to rom relatives. The relative pronoun was the first element in its clause. At some point the external head underwent inverse case attraction, i.e. it started appearing with relative clause internal case and was reanalyzed as a relative clause internal constituent. The relative pronoun itself was forced into second position and eventually reanalyzed as an invariant complementizer head. In terms that we will introduce later, the externally headed relative structure was reanalyzed as an internally headed relative. Further developments involving raising of the NP head and a generalization of pre-rom scrambling would take us to the contemporary externally headed rom relative.
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(i)
We assume that nominals when they combine with predicates always involve a DP projection. Following Eren (2015) and Öztürk and Eren (2021), who discuss the closely related language Pazar Laz, we assume that D’s are always silent in Georgian; we briefly address the question of their semantic content in Sect. 6. The assumption that nominals always involve a DP projection is, however, not crucial to our analysis. We discuss why and outline a D-less alternative at the end of Sect. 6.
Modulo pronunciation, this structure is identical to the one that Kayne (1994) proposed for his raising treatment of externally headed relative clauses. We do not, however, adopt this structure for externally headed relative clauses as that would make the wrong predictions concerning case marking on the NP head; see (30) and (31).
If an IHRC only consists of intransitive verb and the subject is linearly adjacent to –ze as in (i), the sentence is marginally acceptable.
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(i)
The minimally different (ii) is entirely unacceptable.
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(ii)
The difference between (i) and (ii) is merely that (ii) contains an additional DP. We speculate that linear adjacency between the head and the verb makes available an alternate head external parse with a prenominal relative clause (i.e. [[....V] NP]-P) but at this point we don’t know why linear adjacency combined with absence of other relative-clause internal nominals is significant in this manner. A reviewer suggests that this state of affairs could arise from the prenominal verb functioning here as an adjective/participle, which modifies the head noun, yielding a DP which explains why a P head can follow the noun.
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(i)
A reviewer notes that since there can be only one hanging topic in a sentence, our analysis predicts that there should be at most one hanging topic correlative clause in one sentence. This prediction is borne out.
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(i)
However, this seems to be part of wider restriction against having multiple relative clause structures clause-initially. (i), which involves two hanging topics, is out but so are two initial gapped rom relatives and most surprisingly even two initial externally headed relatives. Neither involve hanging topics according to our analysis. At this point, we do not understand the source of this broader restriction.
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(i)
We thank Alice Harris for suggesting this direction to us.
This is because the correlate NP c-commands the Dem and the correlative clause which contains the internal head is dominated by Dem.
Our proposal is inspired by the late merge based treatment of extraposition in Fox and Nissenbaum (1999) and Fox (2002) and extensions in Bhatt and Pancheva (2004) and Takahashi and Hulsey (2009) though given the complexity of demonstrative semantics, our proposal is not formally identical to the preceding ones. We believe that this complexity is an artifact of our partial understanding of the syntax of demonstrative phrases. The literature on the structure of demonstrative phrases reflects a more articulated structure than the one we are assuming in this paper, see for example Kayne (2006).
See for example Safir’s (2019) Peak Novelty Condition. The precise restriction we need departs slightly from that delivered by the Peak Novelty Condition, which only allows Merge to the root node or nodes immediately dominated by the root node. It thus does not permit the generally assumed derivation for sentences like [Which [novel [that Hemingway wrote]]] did he most admire? as here the relative clause is merged with the NP novel, which is not immediately dominated by the root node. We need to allow derivations like these—see (64)—but block other instances of deep countercyclic merge.
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Acknowledgements
Our greatest thanks go to our three anonymous reviewers whose contributions have had an enormous impact on this paper. We are very grateful and amazed by the depth of their engagement with our ideas. Many thanks also to our editor Hedde Zeijlstra. Next we would like to thank our native speaker consultants: Nino Amiridze, Tato Antadze, Natuka Bidzinashvili, Inesa Gelashvili, and Tamara Kalkhitashvili. Our paper benefitted from audiences at TripleA 5 in Konstanz, GLEAMS at Michigan State 2018, South Caucasian Chalk Circle 2 in Tbilisi, RALFe 2018 in Paris, FASAL 9 at Reed College, GLOW 42 in Oslo, the 2019 RNC workshop in Toronto, and Rutgers (Spring 2021). We gratefully acknowledge stimulating discussions on this topic with Carlo Cecchetto, Amy Rose Deal, Caterina Donati, Daniel Harbour, Emily Hainink, Troy Messick, and Ken Safir. Special thanks to David Erschler and Alice Harris for written comments on an early draft.
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Bhatt, R., Nash, L. The common core of relativization in Georgian. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 41, 501–546 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-022-09547-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-022-09547-0