earticle

영어

Transparent free relatives (TFRs) are distinguished from standard free relatives (SFRs) in that they contain a ‘small clause’ consisting of a wh-gap and a predicate phrase, and more importantly, the predicate phrase behaves as the syntactic and semantic ‘nucleus’ of the free relative. Previous analyses have either treated TFRs as a unique construction that necessitates such mechanisms as parenthetical placement or grafts, or assimilated them to SFRs, relying on abstract/empty head elements and a vague semantic relation holding between the gap and the predicate phrase. By contrast, the present paper proposes that, while TFRs share basic constructional properties such as filler-gap dependency and exocentricity with SFRs, their syntactic head values and semantic interpretations should be determined by specific lexical and constructional constraints that pertain to the elements of TFRs. Within the framework of HPSG, the paper shows that the transparency effect of TRFs can be handled by feature inheritance from the nucleus predicate phrase, together with a constructional constraint that deals with the exocentric property of TFRs.