Search results for "relative clauses"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Semantic Complexity in Natural Language
2015
This chapter presents the technical framework that the authors used to define fragments of natural languages and formulate questions as to their semantic complexity. It examines the study of the classical syllogistic and its extensions. It analyzes the semantic complexity of various salient fragments of English. It highlights that the language of argument, featuring transitive verbs, is in an objective sense inferentially no more complex than the language of classical syllogisms exemplified by argument, indeed, the analogous extension featuring ditransitive verbs involves only a modest increase in complexity. On the other hand, the language of argument, which adds relative clauses to the cl…
La costruzione 'con + DP + pseudorelativa': proposta per una duplice interpretazione
2015
This chapter deals with the so-called "absolute construction", an adverbial prepositional phrase headed by the preposition 'con' ('with') followed by a noun and a pseudo-relative clause (e.g. "Con Maria che piange, non possiamo uscire"). The main aim of the chapter is to show that Pseudo-relative clauses can have three different structures, and that two different types are used in the absolute construction, depending on the degree of syntactic integration of the prepositional phrase in the main clause. Fronted 'con'-clauses select a pseudo-relative clause with clausal status (CP), while sentence-final 'con'-clauses, which are more integrated, select a pseudo-relative clause with nominal sta…
Pseudo-relatives and their left-periphery
2016
In this article I propose a new analysis of Pseudo-Relative clauses ('PRs') within the Cartographic model (Rizzi 1997 a.o.). Heretofore, the apparently contradictory behaviour of PRs in the syntactic tests used to determine their structure has been very problematic. Based on new data from Italian, I show that PRs are Small Clauses with a ForceP projection. Moreover, I explain the inconsistent results of the syntactic tests by claiming that PRs can be embedded in different syntactic environments. More specifically, they can be inserted as 'bare' Small Clauses into the matrix clause or be part of a bigger structure: i.e., a Complex-DP, a locative adjunction or a 'Larsonian' structure.