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On Headed, Headless, and Light-Headed Relatives

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Abstract

This paper re-examines a syntactic typology of relative clauses in the light of new data from Polish. While the distinction between headed and headless relatives seems to be syntactically well motivated, Polish (and possibly other languages as well) allow relatives that cannot easily be assimilated to either of these two types. Such relatives, which I will refer to as light-headed relatives, are the topic of this paper. They are headed by morphologically `light elements', and tend to differ from their headed counterparts with respect to relative pronoun or relative complementizer selection.

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Citko, B. On Headed, Headless, and Light-Headed Relatives. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22, 95–126 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:NALA.0000005564.33961.e0

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