Considerations on restrictive relative clauses and adjunction in Modern Italian and Portuguese and Standard German
Martina Gerdts, Maria Goldbach
March 2024 

The following paper returns to the question of whether restrictive relative clauses are instances of wh-movement in the sense of Chomsky 1964 and subsequent transformational publications such as Vergnaud 1974 and many others. We tackle the hypothesis of Carlson 1977 who proposes that there is a subset of restrictive relative clauses he dubs amount relatives. While in English and Italian, there are grammatical evidences for this sub class of relative clauses, other languages such as Portuguese and German lack these evidences or any others. In addition, we point at the two-splitted way that linguists look at restrictive relative clauses. While there is a syntactic tradition around Carlson’s work, semantic work around Partee exists as well. The persistent problem in modern linguistics: Both traditions do not relate to each other.

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Reference:	lingbuzz/007945 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	semantic and syntax of quantifiers; strong cross over; weak cross over; ne-cliticization; imbedded question, semantics, syntax
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