Open AccessSplit-antecedent relative clauses and the symmetry of predicates
Author(s) -
Claudia Poschmann,
Sascha Bargmann,
Christopher Götze,
Anke Holler,
Manfred Sailer,
Gert Webelhuth,
Thomas Ede Zimmermann
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.61.2018.495
Subject(s) - transitive relation , predicate (mathematical logic) , mathematics , object (grammar) , linguistics , antecedent (behavioral psychology) , unary operation , verb , oblique case , semantics (computer science) , computer science , artificial intelligence , discrete mathematics , combinatorics , psychology , philosophy , social psychology , programming language
This paper presents the results of two experiments in German testing the acceptabilityof (non-)restrictive relative clauses (NRCs/RRCs) with split antecedents (SpAs). Accordingto Moltmann (1992), SpAs are only grammatical if their parts occur within the conjuncts ofa coordinate structure and if they have identical grammatical functions. Non-conjoined SpAsthat form the subject and the object of a transitive verb are predicted to be ungrammatical. Ourstudy shows that the acceptability of such examples improves significantly if the predicate thatrelates the parts of the SpA is symmetric. Moreover, it suggests that NRCs and RRCs behavedifferently in these cases with respect to the SpA-construal. We can make sense of this observationif we follow Winter (2016) in assuming that transitive symmetric predicates have to beanalyzed as unary collective predicates and thus provide a collective antecedent for the RC atthe semantic (not the syntactic) level. As we will argue, this accounts for some of the disagreementwe found in the literature and gives us new insights into both the semantics of symmetricpredicates and the semantics of NRCs.Keywords: non-restrictive relative clause, restrictive relative clause, symmetric predicate, splitantecedent.