earticle

영어

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate ambiguities of German relative clause constructions, and the function of restrictive and nonrestrictive uses within the framework of Transformational-Generative grammar. Relative clause constructions describe a relationship brought by a process of embedding which is the generation of one clause within another higher-order or subordinate clause. To make relative clause constructions, there must be co-indexical noun phrases between embedding and main clauses. Relative clause constructions modifying antecedent nouns could change or transform them into participle․adjectival․prepositional adjuncts by reduction of relative clause constructions. This study also presents the syntactic and semantic differences of restrictive and nonrestrictive uses of relative clause constructions with respect to ambiguity. Restrictive relative constructions limit or characterizes the meaning of the noun phrases they modify, whereas nonrestrictive relative constructions function to supply additional information about certain facts.