Kotek, Hadas and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, 2015.
“Relative pronoun pied-piping in English non-restrictive relatives.”
Manuscript, National University of Singapore and McGill University.
We investigate the structure and interpretation of non-restrictive relative clauses in English, concentrating in particular on evidence from the interpretation of relative pronoun pied-piping. We propose that in non-restrictive relatives, relative pronouns are interpreted in-situ within the pied-piped constituent at LF, using Rooth-Hamblin alternative computation. The proposal here has the consequence that non-restrictive relatives are fundamentally proposition-denoting in contrast to restrictive relatives which are property-denoting. We discuss some implications of this proposal.