Abstract
This paper considers how to derive free relatives—e.g. John eats [\(_{DP}\) what Mary eats]—in Minimalist Grammars. Free relatives are string-identical to indirect questions—e.g. John wonders [\(_{CP}\) what Mary eats]. An analysis of free relatives as nominalised indirect questions is easy to implement, but empirical evidence points instead to wh-words ‘reprojecting’ in free relatives. Implementing a reprojection analysis in Minimalist Grammars requires innovations to revise the stipulation that the probe always projects the head, and to allow features to be reused non-consecutively.
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Notes
- 1.
Move is also subject to the shortest move constraint, which will not concern us here.
- 2.
cf. Reprojecting head movement, e.g. [19], about which I will have nothing to say.
- 3.
The question of what features are on what in (12) is postponed to the next subsection.
- 4.
cf. [20] for a unary HPSG schema for free relatives in German.
- 5.
Even with persistent features [25], as discussed in the next subsection, while checking is not necessarily symmetric, structure building is still licensed by pairs of matching features.
- 6.
- 7.
Recall from the illustration of MG in Sect. 2 that in order to converge, the derivation must reach the start category C.
- 8.
Working with the definitions of Reproject in (14) and Cluster in [14], the lexical entries for the wh-words in (20) would be ce :: D \(\bigtriangledown \)wh -wh *Q, unde :: P \(\bigtriangledown \)wh \(\bigtriangleup \)wh and când :: P \(\bigtriangleup \)wh. The reprojection trigger *Q would co-occur with -wh, not the Cluster licensor \(\bigtriangledown \)wh or licensee \(\bigtriangleup \)wh.
- 9.
I set aside whom as an archaism.
- 10.
The length of the reused string is finitely bounded, in that only lexical items and not phrases can be reused – recall the restrictor restriction on FRs from Sect 5.1.
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Stockwell, R. (2019). Free Relatives, Feature Recycling, and Reprojection in Minimalist Grammars. In: Sikos, J., Pacuit, E. (eds) At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information. ESSLLI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11667. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_10
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