CHAPTER 3: RELATIVE CLAUSE CONSTRUCTIONS:
1 FATHER READ]
3.3.3. RCCs in Italian Sign Language
3.3.3.2. RCCs in LIS as Circumnominals
not cover the meaning ‘all the boys left,’ however, (80a) sentence has a such meaning (p. 954). This may give us a clue that the semantic property of relative clauses in LIS does necessarily have to be restrictive. Furthermore, PROREL constructions cannot take negative quantifiers like NOBODY/NO-ONE as in (80b).
The final argument is that PROREL also permits proper name antecedents, in which case the meaning of the relative clause must be appositive. As a result, Cecchetto et al. show that LIS correlatives do have non-restrictive interpretations.
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a. ALL BOYi –IX LEAVE PRORELi-THEYi CALL DONE Two interpretations:
All the boys that left called.
All the boys left and called.
b. Negative Quantifier (p. 968)
* NOBODY LEAVE PROREL CALL ?Nobody who left called
c. PROREL permits also having proper name antecedents
(p. 955, footnote 10):
GIANNIi CALL PRORELi LEAVE.
Gianni, who called, left.
(Cecchetto et al. 2006, p. 968)
refer to them. Branchini and Donati intend to analyze these bi-clausal constructions as IHRC.
Data from three informants is obtained in a relative clause elicitation task in Branchini & Donati’s work. Two of the informants are from Ancona and the other is from Rome. In addition, Branchini has a variety of other data at her disposal in her dissertation: (i) a corpus of naturalistic LIS data, (ii) a corpus consisting of some elicited data from research done at the University of Milan Bicocca, and (iii) a corpus of elicited data which mainly consists of elicitations from seven native deaf signers from Rome, Ancona and Pesaro. Both studies mainly refer to the area of Rome and Ancona.
As for the elicitation task in Branchini’s dissertation, the native signers are exposed to a situation or a setting with some context, in which there are some referents (i.e. three women) who are described in terms of their actions and properties, so that they can answer some elicitation questions referring to that contextual information. For example, a question like Which woman left early? is expected to be answered like The woman who did not talk to anyone left early. (p.
16).
PE-clauses in LIS have two important properties: (i) the presence of PE and (ii) the presence of nonmanual markers. Branchini & Donati (2009, p. 7) describe the sign PE in details: PE is realized manually with the index finger stretched out and shaken downwards. PE signs also interact with signing space, the movement of PE is directed at the location of the head noun. The nonmanual marker for correlatives in LIS has only been identified with eyebrow-raise by Cecchetto et al.
(2006). Branchini & Donati add some more realized facial expressions: tension of eyes and upper cheeks (p. 7).
They show two different bi-clausal constructions to compare coordination and subordination (here, relative clauses). The main distinction between (81a) and (81b) is the existence of PE and nonmanual markers in the PE-clause, which is glossed as ‘rel’ in this section:
(81) a. DOGi CAT CHASE (IXi) HOME COME DONE The dog chased the cat and came home.
b. _________________rel
DOGi CAT CHASE PEi (IXi) HOME COME DONE The dog that chased the cat came home.
(Branchini & Donati 2009, p. 6)
Branchini & Donati agree that such constructions are not externally headed and free relatives as Cecchetto et al. claim. The head noun occurs in the PE-clause and temporal adverbs for the context in the relative clause may precede the head noun. The rest of their competing analysis concerns correlatives and IHRC. As opposed to Cecchetto et al., Branchini & Donati argue that PE-clauses are extraposed internally headed RCs. They argue on the grounds of three pieces of evidence: (i) the nominal status of PE-clauses, (ii) the correlation between PE and head noun and (iii) extraposition.
The first piece of evidence for extraposed IHRCs in LIS is the nominal status of PE-clauses. According to Branchini & Donati, the sign PE has a nominalization and determiner function. (82a) shows an example for nominalizing the head noun HOUSE, with raised brows (which is glossed as ‘rb’). If PE can be found in nominal contexts, it is also possible to nominalize the clause itself. PE can either take the determiner position or nominal position, as for instance, PE in (82b), or be located at the end of the PE-clause, as in (81b):
(82)
rb
a. HOUSEi PEi ANNAi IXi BUY WANT It is a house that Anna wants to buy.
__________________________rel
b. CHILD PE COMPETITION WIN TEACHER PRIZE GIVE The teacher gives a prize to the child who has won the competition.
(Branchini & Donati 2009, pp. 13-14):
An index can follow the PE sign, as shown in (81b). The parentheses indicate the optionality of the index. Branchini & Donati describe the co-referentiality in correlatives where the PE-clause can co-refer to a pointing or a gap. They show another example for co-referentiality: the PE-clause can co-refer to quantifiers (83) (p. 14):
(83)
… rel
BOYi EXAM DONE PEi PASS NOBODY No boy that took the exam passed.
Branchini & Donati provide one more piece of evidence: extraposition. In the analysis of correlatives, the position of the (cor)relative is left (left-adjoined).
However, they argue that PE-clauses are in fact extraposed (to the left). One indication of this is the obligatoriness of the nonmanual markers in the PE-clause.
The nonmanual notated as ‘rel’ which includes ‘tensed eyes’ somewhat tends to locate the leftmost. They do not provide any further explanation of the reason for this tendency. Another clear piece of evidence is the sensitivity to islands as shown below. In (84a), the relative clause disallows the ‘I know’ construction. The relative clause the teacher who gave a prize is an island blocking reconstruction of the relative clause the child who wins (p. 17).
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a. rel
[CHILDi COMPETITION WIN PEi] [IX KNOW TEACHER PRIZE CHILD COMPETITION WIN PE GIVE]
I know that the teacher gave a prize to the child who won.
b. *[CHILDi COMPETITION WIN PEi] [TEACHERk PRIZE CHILD COMPETITION WIN PE GIVE PEk] [IX KNOW]
I know the teacher that gave a prize to the child who won.
(Branchini & Donati 2009, pp. 17-18)
Branchini et al. (2007) lists the possible positions of PE-clauses in LIS. For instance, sentence (85a) shows that relative clauses cannot split the matrix clause.
They have to be located either before the matrix clause (85b) or immediately after it (85c). As opposed to DGS, as shown in (74a), LIS does not allow center-embedded.
(85)
rel
a. * TEACHER [CHILDi COMPETITION WIN PEi] PRIZE GIVEi The teacher gives a prize to the child who wins the competition.
rel
b. CHILDi COMPETITION WIN PEi TEACHER PRIZE GIVEi rel c. TEACHER PRIZE GIVEi CHILDi COMPETITION WIN PEi
(Branchini et al. 2007, p. 4):
If we consider the semantic analysis of LIS (cor)relatives, Cecchetto et al.
argue LIS correlatives are non-restrictive, as mentioned earlier; however, Branchini and Donati show that LIS PE-clauses tend to be restrictive. They provide several good tests for the restrictivity of PE-clauses. Before introducing these tests, I would like to provide some counter-arguments against the Cecchetto et al. examples (80a,b), provided by Branchini (2006).
Cecchetto et al. show non-restrictivity using the semantic interpretation of quantifiers in (cor)relatives. For example, in (80a), which is repeated here for convenience in (86a), with a slight modification, the quantifier ALL can be applied to both the (cor)relative and matrix clause; in other words, the interpretation yields
‘all the boys left’ and ‘all the boys called’, as indicated in the interpretation (80b).
Branchini compares this unexpected interpretation to a non-restrictive example (86c) in English, which is an EHRC. As shown in the English version, the quantifier ‘all’ is external to the relative, because ‘all’ is combined with the NP.
Likewise, ALL in LIS can be internal to the relative which does not necessarily lead to interpret this as a non-restrictive relative. If the quantifier is in the relative clause as in (86d), this also yields a similar interpretation. Branchini and Donati (2009) call this ‘unexpected entailment’. Thus, if ALL is considered as internal to the relative, it is possible to obtain a restrictive reading.
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a. ALL BOYSi LEAVE PEi THEYi PHONE26
(see also Cecchetto et al. 2006, p. 968) b. All the boys left and phoned.
c. All the boys, who left, phoned.
d. ? The boys who all left phoned.
(Branchini 2006, p. 174)
Cecchetto et al. also show the impossibility of using negative quantifiers in (cor)relatives (80b), which is repeated in (87a). Even in English, which permits both appositive and restrictive readings, it is not permitted to use ‘nobody’ in both readings. Because these arguments may lead to the wrong interpretations, Branchini & Donati (2009) think they do not satisfactorily support the non-restrictive reading.
26 Branchini (2006) uses the examples from Cecchetto et al. (2006, p. 968). She prefers to use
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a. *NOBODY LEAVE PE PHONE DONE
(see also Cecchetto et al. 2006, p. 968) b. *Nobody, who left, phoned.
c. *The boys who nobody left phoned.
(Branchini 2006, pp. 174 -175)
In addition, Branchini & Donati, list the testing criteria for the restrictivity of PE-clauses (see Table 3.4). They compare English appositive and restrictive clauses to LIS PE-clauses. They conclude LIS PE-clauses behave like restrictive clauses (Table 3.4). For example, LIS PE-clauses cannot take sentential adverbs in their scope (for English samples, see Ogle 1974). The head in PE-clauses cannot be a pronoun nor a proper name; while PE-clauses may include ordinal heads. The head of PE-clauses can be under matrix negation. PE-clauses allow stacking27 ellipsis reconstructions. Finally, PE-clauses are within the scope of intentional verbs, such as ‘to think‘. Such properties cannot be applied to appositive readings.
Thus, Branchini & Donati clarify the restrictivity of PE-clauses. The reader is referred to their article for LIS examples.
27 “Stacking” is defined as to internal recursion namely the in the possibility for the relative CP to contain an antecedent modified by another relative clause. (Branchini 2006, p. 64) Recursive is the opposite of the linear embedding (stacking).
Table 3.4 - Testing restrictivity of LIS PE-clauses and comparison with English appositives and restrictives (Branchini & Donati 2009, p. 30)