earticle

영어

English has two types of free relatives, standard free relatives (SFR) and transparent free relatives (TFRs). One prominent difference between them is that the head of the SFR is the relative pronoun what, whereas that of the TFR is the small clause predicate, which is commonly called the pivot following Grosu (2014). Specifically, the pivot determines the TFR’s syntactic number, (in)definiteness, and syntactic category, and this phenomenon has been often called TFRs’ transparency. Many analyses have been proposed to account for the syntactic properties of TFRs, but none of them is so satisfactory. This paper argues that the peculiar properties of TFRs are successfully explained by positing that TFRs can be derived by two distinct ways, namely specifying coordination in the sense of Matsuyama (2018) and parenthetical insertion in the sense of Schelfhout et al.(2004). It is also argued that the two analyses in question are part of independently motivated syntactic modules, and so the idea of dual derivation would not be a big burden to the grammar. Though more elaboration needs to be done by future research, several problematic cases can be given a better account under the proposal presented in this paper.