Possessive Relative Clause Constructions

In the relative-clause construction examined in the current chapter, the relative pronoun is embedded in a larger phrase, as in the coach [whose athletes]. For syntactic reasons, only the wh-word is required to occur in SpecCP. Nevertheless, the whole phrase containing it is located in SpecCP. Something similar can be ob-served with prepositional phrases as in the coach [with whom] I had an argument.

Ross (1967) coined the term PIED-PIPING for this phenomenon which occurs in questions as well (Whose athletes were doped? Which athletes were doped? With

9Reinhart (2006) distinguishes a third relation, namely covaluation, that is index sharing in the absence of binding but including the possibility of variable binding by a shared binder (‘co-binding’ in Heim’s terminology (Heim, 1998)).

10Sternefeld (2006) suggests an alternative mechanism, namely downward transfer of agreement features from D via CP to C where they are transferred to the relative pronoun in a spec–head relation.

whom did you have an argument?).¹¹ Pied-piping has long been considered to be exceptional since it violates the otherwise well established generalization that wh-movement is restricted to elements that have a wh-feature. To capture this the-oretical challenge, work within the Principles-and-Parameters framework usually assumed that the wh-feature percolates up to the maximal phrase containing the wh-word and thereby marks the corresponding phrase as a wh-phrase.¹²

The possessive relative pronoun whose occupies the leftmost position of the phrase containing it. Its complementary distribution with articles and other de-terminers suggests analyzing all of them in a similar way. Traditional analyses assuming an NP locate determiners in SpecNP as shown in (9).

(9) a. NP b. NP

Det N’ Det N’

| | | |

whose N the N

| |

athletes athletes

According to the DP-hypothesis (Abney, 1987; Szabolcsi, 1983), determiners are functional heads that can take NPs as complements. Possessive determiners like whose are sometimes analyzed as consisting of two syntactic heads occurring as one word for phonological reasons (e.g., Radford, 1997). As shown in (10), the possessive -s is analyzed as a determiner which takes who as its specifier. Phono-logically, -s cliticizes to who forming who’s which is orthographically spelled whose.

(10) DP

DP D’

|

who D NP

| |

-s athletes

This analysis which treats whose (analyzed as who’s) on par with other possessive expressions such as Peter’s or the man’s offers an explanation for pied-piping:

11The term pied piping is inspired by the story of the pied piper of Hameln whose pied piping attracted the rats and then the children to follow him out of Hameln.

12Recently, Heck (2008) offered an account that works without feature percolation. In a nut-shell, Heck’s account derives the properties of pied-piping from the interaction of the theory of phases (Chomsky, 2000, 2001) and the inclusion of wh-movement under the operation Agree (Chomsky, 2001) with the further restriction that wh-feature checking should be as local as possi-ble.

if who and -s are separate heads who cannot be preposed on its own since this would leave -s behind unable to cliticize to who. This restriction is known as the Stray Affix Filter (Baker, 1988) or Lasnik’s Filter (Lasnik, 1981); see also Lasnik (1995); Chomsky (1991). Nor can the sequence who’s be moved since it does not form a constituent.¹³ As a result, the possessive phrase whose athletes is the minimal constituent eligible for movement.

Possessive relative pronouns challenge any relative clause analysis which as-sumes that the head noun originates as the complement of the relative pronoun.

The problem is that the possessive apparently already has a complement—the pos-sessee. Furthermore, extracting the possessor (= the head of the relative clause) as assumed in the Head Raising Analysis runs in to problems since it violates local-ity constraints such as the Condition on Extraction Domains proposed by Huang (1982). Moreover, the possessor can originate in a deeply embedded position nor-mally opaque to extraction (e.g., the man whose wife’s colleague I met). Amongst others, this is the reason why Bhatt (2002) explicitly rejects the idea that the Head Raising Analysis can be applied to possessive relative clauses. Kayne (1994), on the other hand, devotes a whole chapter in his book showing that and how posses-sive relative clauses can be analyzed under the assumption of the Head Raising Analysis. He offers the following derivation which makes use of the split-analysis of whose. The initial structure of the relative clause contains a DP comprising who, the possessor , the determiner -s, and the possessee. In a first step, the DP undergoes raising to SpecCP; the subsequent step extracts the possessor and moves it to the specifier position of the DP. The derivation yields the structure in (11) (taken from Kayne (1994:90) and slightly modified).

(11) the [_CP[[_DPman_j[who t_j]]’s wife]_i[C⁰... t_i...

The analysis of -s in occurrences like the man’s as a determiner was first dis-cussed in Abney (1987) who credits the idea to Richard Larson. Abney himself, however, favors an analysis which treats -s as a case marker roughly correspond-ing to a postposition. He motivates his preference with diachronic evidence as well as with cross-linguistic evidence. Abney’s doubts apply to German as well.

The assumption that the possessive determiner consists of two independent heads is hardly convincing for German. First of all, the German counterparts of whose which are dessen and deren lack an equivalent of -s which can be reasonably separated. Dessen and deren are genitive forms of the relative pronoun and homo-morphous with the transitive demonstrative. Of course, dessen and deren can be morphologically divided into d- and -essen/-eren but there is no obvious link to the possessive -s which by the way can only be used with proper names. Hence, I assume that German possessive -s is a genitive marker possibly derived from the

13A technical solution like head adjunction faces new problems.

genitive affix -(e)s which is used in combination with masculine and neuter nouns.

The relative pronoun dessen/deren is best analyzed as a single determiner.

5.2.1.3 Summary

In summary, the proper analysis of relative clauses is an issue of debate. Cur-rently, those analyses are gaining ground which assume a relative clause internal representation of the head, i.e. the Head Raising Analysis and the Matching Anal-ysis. This dissertation does not aim to contribute to this debate. Therefore and for reasons of comparability with the psycholinguistic literature, I adhere to the simplest possible analysis of the relative-clause construction under investigation.

More elaborated analyses will be considered only when appropriate. The ques-tion of whether nominal phrases are NPs or DPs will not play an important role for the discussion; therefore I follow common practice within psycholinguistics and analyze nominal phrases as NPs. Furthermore, I abstract away from potential differences between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses and analyze all relative clauses in the traditional way as adjuncts to N’. The phrase containing the relative pronoun is analyzed as an NP located in SpecCP while the relative pronoun itself is assumed to occupy the specifier position of that NP. Hence, the subject NP in a sentence like (3) has the structure shown in (12).

(12) NP