Language and linguistics compass

Abstract

This article outlines the shortcomings found in two well-known syntax-based typologies of internally headed relative constructions (IHRCs), and demonstrates the benefits of a typology that relies on the syntax-semantics interface and takes semantics seriously into account. It is argued that the latter approach yields a more revealing and empirically superior typology of IHRCs.

The construction in (1) belongs to the syntactic class of Externally Headed Relative Con-structions (EHRCs), a term that purports to reflect the fact that the CP-external pivot is a fully specified phrase of arbitrary complexity, in contrast to the CP-internal pivot, which is typically overtly realized either as a chain of the kind illustrated in (1), or simply as a gap, or as a ‘resumptive’ pronoun. The reader is hereby warned that the term ‘head’ is used in this context with pre-theoretical import, and should not be confused with the homony-mous term ‘head’ used in linguistic theorizing, where it typically denotes a lexical item.

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Note that the Navajo sentence in (2) and its English counterpart have, as far as one can tell, the same meaning, and one may wonder whether whatever is expressible by means of an EHRC is also expressible by means of an IHRC, and⁄or vice-versa. The answer is negative both ways. As will be seen in what follows, there are certain meanings that are expressible by EHRCs, but not by IHRCs, and some that are expressible by IHRCs, but not by EHRCs.

As stated in the title, this paper is concerned with the typology of IHRCs. Before tackling this task, however, a couple of general remarks about IHRCs are in order.

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A Novel Typology of Internally Headed Relatives 449

To this undoubtedly interesting debate, I have nothing of substance to contribute, and I believe that in the present state of our knowledge, the issue needs to be viewed as open and in need of a great deal of further research. As far as I can tell, all the above proposals seem to ‘leak’ in some way, and I thus prefer to remain agnostic concerning the possibil-ity of universal necessary, and especially sufficient, conditions. To give just one example of arguable leakage, I note that Watanabe (2004) attributes the existence of IHRCs in Imbabura Quechua to the existence of an indeterminate system and of in-situ focus. However, Romanian also has a rich indeterminate system (as illustrated by: cine ‘who’, care which’, cine-va ‘someone’, ori-cine ‘whoever’, fie-care ‘each’), as well as in-situ focus, and moreover resembles Imbabura Quechua in having obligatory wh-interrogative front-ing, but has no IHRCs. The only visible difference between the two languages is that in-situ focus is morphologically marked in Imbabura Quechua and intonationally marked in Romanian, but blaming the different behavior of the two languages on the pres-ence⁄absence of overt marking is a dubious move, in view of so many well-known instances in which overt and covert elements behave alike. In short, I prefer to remain agnostic on the matter at issue, as already noted.

We now finally turn to the principal concern of this study, namely, the typology of IHRCs. The need for such a typology of IHRCs was not initially recognized in the the-oretically oriented literature of the last forty years or so, some scholars assuming that

450 Alexander Grosu

tinguish (at least two) distinct sub-classes, with different clusters of properties. Some of these typologies were primarily based on syntactic and⁄or morphological properties, and others, on semantic properties viewed from the perspective of the syntax-semantics inter-face. Non-exhaustive, alphabetically ordered lists of studies are: for the former approach, Hiraiwa (2005, 2008, 2009), Watanabe (2004), and for the latter approach, Grosu (1994), Grosu and Landman (1998), Hoshi (1995), Shimoyama (1999, 2001), Hastings (2004), Kim (2007). The thrust of the argumentation provided in what follows is that while the former approach has yielded some results, an approach that seriously takes semantics into account can reveal deeper and empirically superior generalizations.

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Language and Linguistics Compass 6/7 (2012): 447–476, 10.1002/lnc3.346

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Language and Linguistics Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Language and Linguistics Compass 6/7 (2012): 447–476, 10.1002/lnc3.346

A third objection I have to Hiraiwa’s proposals concerns the Gur languages, which, as noted in section 1, constitutes the principal focus of his work on IHRCs. In section 5.2. of Hiraiwa (2008), it is explicitly predicted that ‘if an overt D is not projected, HIRCs should be prohibited’, and thus that those Gur languages that license IHRCs should not allow indefinite IHRCs, a prediction Hiraiwa claims is confirmed (see his (35)–(37), in particular, the example (36a) from Moore´). However, Emmanuel Nikiema (p.c.), a native speaker of Moore´, assures me that indefinite IHRCs are possible in this language, and provides the supporting data in (5):

(5) a. m mii [rawa˜ sen seg biig a ye] I know the man REL meet child one ‘‘I know one child that the man met.’’ b. m mii [rawa˜ sen seg biiga] I know the man REL meet child.indef.

The remainder of this paper is devoted to presenting a classification of IHRCs from a com-bined syntax-semantics perspective, and to arguing that such an approach can go a great deal further in revealing interesting typological distinctions than the approaches discussed in section 2. As a preamble to this task, it will be useful to outline the major semantic types of relative clause constructions that have been recognized in earlier literature on the basis of syntactic constructions of a different sort, using English EHRCs for illustration.

Traditionally, relative clauses were semantically classified as restrictive and appositive. The distinction can be appreciated in relation to the EHRCs in (6).

In both examples, the noun in italics restricts the denotation of the bracketed expression to boys, but it is only in (6a) that the boldfaced clause imposes a further restriction. Thus, (6a) allows for the possibility that the speaker saw additional boys, but beardless ones, while [6b] claims the speaker saw no more than three boys.

Over the last 35 years or so, a number of studies have argued for the recognition of a third semantic type, which appears to be manifested in a wide variety of syntactic garbs; for a survey of the literature up to the year of its publication, see Grosu (2002). For pres-ent purposes, we may roughly and informally characterize the third type as a sort of con-verse of the appositive type, in the sense that the denotation of the construction is fully defined within the relative clause, rather than within the matrix, as it is in appositives. This can be appreciated in relation to the EHRC in [7], whose special properties were initially pointed out by Carlson (1977) (for a formal analysis of this construction, see Grosu & Landman 1998).

(8) a. At the party, I saw only [three boys who had beards who wore no clothes].

b. At the party, I saw only [three boys, who had no beards, who had no hair, either].

454 Alexander Grosu

bearded boys who were clothed; in slightly more technical terms, the interpretation of this example relies on the intersection of three predicates (construed as sets of entities), namely, the noun boys and the two relative clauses. In (8b), the boldfaced appositive pro-vides additional information (subject to certain pragmatic ‘coherence’ requirements that need not concern us here); the denotation of the bracketed expression remains confined to three boys. In (8c), the boldfaced relative is unacceptable in its full version, because the denotation of the construction is already fully determined by the italicized relative, leaving no interpretation for it (except as a correction of the italicized relative, in which case, it needs to be preceded by comma intonation); the reduced version of the boldfaced clause does not induce unacceptability, because it is construable as an ‘extraposed’ restric-tive relative that modifies the EH, a state of affairs that leaves open the possibility that there may have been additional books on ‘your’ desk which had not earlier been on ‘my’desk.

Unlike Navajo, which exhibits the same clause-external morphology in both definite and indefinite constructions (see section 2), Lakhota has a highly differentiated determiner system, and thus distinguishes such constructions overtly, as shown in (9a-b) (=William-son’s (4a) and (23a) respectively). For completeness, I note that Lakhota allows the entire range of semantically strong Ds in relative-external position, a fact not fully illustrated in Williamson’s article, but brought to my attention by Janice Williamson (p.c.), and illus-trated in (9c). Furthermore, Williamson notes that the strong Ds are all prohibited in clause-internal position as local binders of the IH:

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(10) [[Ogle eya sˇapsˇapa cha] agli pi wachi] ki lena e shirt some dirty Indef take-home Pl I-want the these be ‘These are the shirts that are dirty that I want them to take home.’

The prohibition of strong determiners in local association with the IHs is a fundamental characteristic of this type, and prominently distinguishes it from the types discussed in sections 3.2. and 4. Williamson points out in her section 7.3.2. that this ‘indefiniteness effect’ receives a straightforward explanation once an ambiguity in the term ‘indefinite’ is taken into account. Thus, ‘indefinite’ expressions, such as a quilt or two doctors, can func-tion as predicates, as in (11a), as existentially quantified arguments, as in (11b), or as proper subparts of an argument that exhibits an overt strong D, as in (11c).

c. We shipped the {fifty ferocious, ferocious fifty lions to Blijdorp (and the {thirty meek, meek thirty} lions to Artis).

These data show that weak determiners may appear in either order relative to incontro-vertible adjectives when the D position is filled by a strong D, as in (12c), but not when a strong D is absent. Landman proposes on this basis that expressions like those italicized in

The points made in the preceding paragraph are directly relevant to Lakhota. As it happens, this language uses morphologically distinct indefinite articles with simplex nomi-nals and with IHRCs, as illustrated by the italicized items in (9a) and (9b) respectively, but both articles are excluded in the presence of a strong determiner within the same minimal nominal expression; thus, ‘the quilt’ can only be rendered by the reduced ver-sion of owi˛zˇa (*wa˛) ki, and (9a) becomes ungrammatical if a token of cha is inserted to the immediate left of ki; in contrast, the internal token of wa˛ and the external token of ki in (9a) are compatible with each other, because they belong to different DPs.

Turning now to semantic considerations, the indefinite IHRC in (9b) must undergo Existential Closure, since it occurs in argument position and is construed with existential force. The IH in (9a) must not undergo closure, and must retain predicate status, since the CP-external strong determiner would otherwise have no variable to bind. Impor-tantly, all IHs in Lakhota must have predicate status, so that the variable they restrict should be accessible to CP-external strong Ds or Existential Closure. This requirement extends to complex IHs, such as the phrase within the smaller pair of brackets in (10); in general, only the maximal IHRC in a stacked construction may exhibit strong Ds or undergo Existential Closure, all IHs within them, whether simplex or complex, must have predicate status.

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Language and Linguistics Compass 6/7 (2012): 447–476, 10.1002/lnc3.346

In discussing Watanabe’s (2004) typology, we noted that he attributed the island-insensi-tivity of certain IHRCs to the island-insensitivity of long-distance binding. The effect at issue is captured equally well by abstraction, which is independently known to be island-insensitive. To illustrate, the full version of the English translation of (14) is acceptable in those idiolects that tolerate resumptive pronouns, and comparable data are fine in lan-guages where relativization with resumptive pronouns is a dominant strategy (e.g., in Modern Hebrew). The explanation usually provided for the contrast between data like the full and the reduced version of the English translation of (14) is that the full version makes no use of syntactic movement (which is island-sensitive), while the reduced ver-sion does. In sum, if abstraction is the only long-distance process operating in Lakhota IHRCs, their island-insensitivity is unsurprising.

For the reason just indicated, the acceptability of (14) is in conflict with an additional proposal made by Williamson, namely, that the IH needs to undergo covert raising to a relative-external position. This proposal is motivated by (i) the observation that negative polarity items typically need to be licensed by a clause-mate token of sentential negation, and by (ii) the claim that when such items function as IHs, the licensing token of nega-tion can only be in the matrix. (ii) relies on Williamson’s example in (15) (= her (21)), whose (alleged) acceptability is accounted for by an analysis that involves raising of the IH into the matrix, if it is also assumed that the clause-mate requirement holds at the level of Logical Form. However, as already noted, the assumption of covert raising is in conflict with island-insensitivity.

Basilico (1996, section 7) notes this problem, and endeavors to circumvent it by means of an elaborate alternative analysis. There are, however, good grounds for concluding that there is no need to circumvent anything, because the data on which Williamson’s raising proposal relied appear to be incorrect. Thus, Regina Pustet, who has devoted many years to the study of Lakhota with large numbers of native consultants, informs me (in a p.c.) that she has never encountered data like (15) in all her years of contact with Lakhota, and that all her native consultants unanimously and unhesitatingly reject (15). She further-more kindly brought to my attention the fact that the only way to express something rel-atively close to the intended meaning of (15) is by means of the partitive construction in (16), where – crucially – both the negative polarity item and the token of negation are clause-mates in overt representation. There is thus no need to assume covert displacement of the IH, at least insofar as the licensing of negative polarity items is concerned.

(16) [Sˇu˛ka eya ophewathu˛] ki wa˛zˇini sape sˇni dog some.Pl bought.I the a-not black Neg ‘None of the dogs I bought is black.’

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A Novel Typology of Internally Headed Relatives 459

The maximalizing type will be discussed in relation to Japanese, a language in which at least some of the properties that crucially distinguish its IHRCs from those discussed in Section 3.1. are transparently reflected in overt representation. An additional reason for choosing Japanese to illustrate the maximalizing type is that its IHRCs have been addressed most extensively in earlier literature, and from a variety of perspectives, for example, the syntactic, semantic and⁄or pragmatic perspective. At the same time, it needs to be noted that IHRCs do not constitute the ‘dominant’ relativization strategy in Japanese, in the sense that while all the speakers seem to allow EHRCs, some do not allow IHRCs at all, and those who do allow them fall into groups that exhibit variation as to the range of IHs they allow (for details, see Grosu & Landman 2012). Furthermore, as noted by Kuroda (1975–1976), the IHRCs of Japanese – in contrast to its EHRCs – are subject to a pragmatic requirement which he dubbed ‘The Rele-vancy Condition’, a constraint that makes it (at least potentially) more challenging, but also more interesting, to study some of the properties of these relatives; in particular, those properties that can in principle be attributed to either grammatical or pragmatic factors. The condition will be made explicit and illustrated later in this section (see (26), (27) and surrounding text)2.

Unlike those of Lakhota, the IHRCs of Japanese do not exhibit overt CP-external Ds, although there are grounds for assuming that a null D may be present (see, e.g., Watanabe 2006 for arguments that Japanese nominal constructions in general are endowed with a D, which occasionally, although not always, houses an overt item). Be this as it may, Japanese IHRCs invariably have definite force, an important property first pointed out by Hoshi (1995). A crucial property that overtly distinguishes the IHRCs of Japanese from those of Lakhota is that the IHs are sometimes bound by strong Ds that occur within the relative and – importantly – have relative-internal scope (they can furthermore also be bound by Existential Closure with relative-internal scope). The contribution of the IH to the semantics of the IHRC can thus not be of the same kind as in Lakhota, and this impor-tant issue will be prominently addressed in this section.

(18) Taro-wa [[Yoko-ga reezooko-ni __ irete-oita] hotondo-no kukkii-o]

(19) Taro-wa [[Yoko-ga reezooko-ni

__ irete-oita] kukkii-o hotondo]

(21) Taro-wa [[Yoko-ga reezooko-ni kukkii-o hotondo irete-oita]-no-o Taro-Top Yoko-Nom refrigerator-Loc cookie-Acc almost-all put-Aux-NML-Acc paatii-ni motte itta.

party-to brought
‘Yoko put almost all the cookies in the fridge and Taro brought {them, *some} to the party.’

A Novel Typology of Internally Headed Relatives 461

structure, and these can only be adnominal, since to can only conjoin nominal expressions, and in any event the same adverb does not normally occur twice in the same sentence.

This example is the closest that one may come to creating a ‘stacking construction’, but it should be noted there are no stacked clauses, because the more deeply embedded brack-eted constituent is a full-fledged IHRC, that is, a Case-marked DP that serves as direct object of the immediately higher verb. In contrast to the Lakhota example in (10), the higher IHRC does not purport to denote a proper subpart of some sum of papers written by Mary, but simply the paper she wrote on the version with yonda ‘read’, and the paper with modifications made by John on the version with kaizensita ‘improve’5.

Having shown that Japanese IHRCs are maximalizing and distinct from restrictive rela-tives, it seems important to clarify how they differ from appositives (in view of a number of past suggestions that they might be ‘non-restrictive’ in the sense of being appositive). In English and other languages with post-nominal EHRCs, appositives are typically set off from the matrix by flanking pauses; this is, however, not a necessary property of appositive modifiers in general, since it is not found in languages with pre-nominal EHRCs (such as Japanese is). What crucially distinguishes appositives from maximalizing constructions is that the denotation of the construction is fully characterized by the matrix in the former case, and by the relative in the latter (for a similar remark, see Hoshi 1995,

(24) a. Anthony caught exactly two thieves last night, who were running away. b. Furthermore, he also caught last night two thieves who were hiding outside the prison.

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My view is that pragmatics is indeed responsible for the preferred readings of (26a) and (26b), but I believe that it ‘kicks in’ at the level of the IH, not at the level of the IHRC. Observe in this connection that if a little boy sees an ice-cream stand and asks his father‘do you have one dollar with you?’, an appropriate and felicitous answer is ‘yes, I do’even if the father has more than one dollar in his wallet, and not, for example, ‘#no, I have twenty dollars with me.’ The reason is that the additional money the father may have in his wallet is irrelevant in this context, and is in fact ignored by both participants. Similarly, (27) can be felicitously used regardless of how many tickets each passenger may have had in his⁄her pocket, because any tickets in excess of a single randomly chosen one are contextually irrelevant. If so, I submit that (26b) can be safely viewed as a straightforward maximalizing IHRC, in which the cardinality⁄size of the IH is pragmati-cally inferred, rather than grammatically specified. There are thus no grounds for accept-ing Kubota & Smith’s thesis.

Having put to rest Kubota & Smith’s challenge to the maximality thesis, we will now consider and compare two lines of analysis that have been proposed in the literature in an attempt to deal with the maximality effect (as well as with other properties of IHRCs).

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particular, to the CNPC. We begin by addressing (b) in some detail (for (a), see example (39) and the immediately preceding paragraph).

To illustrate the effect of the conjunction of (28) and (29), consider the example (21), repeated below for convenience.

(21) Taro-wa [[Yoko-ga reezooko-ni kukkii-o hotondo irete-oita]-no-o Taro-Top Yoko-Nom refrigerator-Loc cookie-Acc almost-all put-Aux-NML-Acc paatii-ni motte itta.

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‘The professor praised the paper that that graduate student had written, and he (= the student) was appointed as an instructor.’

The suffix -no on the constituent within the more inclusive pair of brackets coerces an analysis of this constituent as an IHRC, and the phrasing has been devised in such a way as to maximize compatibility with (28), (29). Thus, the hypothesis which the student

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(34) [[ChR]] = kEkxke.E(e) � CE(e)=x

In this formula, E is a variable over sets of events, e is a variable over events, x is a vari-able over individuals, and CE is a function that picks out a contextually salient thematic role in the set of events E indicated by its subscript, and thus in its event argument e (since e is a member of E).

However, if the element in [Spec, ChRP] is simply a free variable, we are back at square one, in the sense that there is no guarantee that the y variable will ultimately be bound

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Fifth, the analysis accounts for the contrast in (39) (= (33) in Grosu & Landman 2012), in particular, for the impossibility of accommodation in (39b), because the students who had not come to the party are not salient participants in any event denoted by the relative clause.

(39) a. Hitorino insei-mo doyoobi-no party-ni ikanakatta.

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b. *[[Hitorino insei-mo doyoobi-no party-ni ikanakatta]-no]-ga [[no grad-student Saturday-Gen party-to go-Neg-Past]-no]-Nom jitsuwa uchi-de term paper-o kaite ita.

two accidentally cliff-from fall-PAST
‘A policeman was chasing a robber and they both fell off the cliff accidentally.’

Seventh, the analysis can account for ‘collecting’ construals of IHRCs, which are found in cases where the IH is in the scope of a distributive quantifier, as in (41) (= (69) in Grosu & Landman 2012), where the IHRC denotes the total sum of apples bought by the three children together, that is, six apples.

This sum of apples will be picked out by ChR if its argument VP is interpreted as a sum of events e such that for each child, there is a subevent e’ of e such that (the value of) the Theme of e’ is a sum of two apples (see Grosu & Landman 2012 section 4.5. for detailed discussion).

(40) and (41) illustrate the second half of a generalization enunciated in section 1, namely, that there are meanings expressible by IHRCs that are not expressible by EHRCs (an illustration of the first half was provided in section 3). Importantly, data like (41) are distinct from ‘functional’ EHRCs like the one in (42), which cannot denote the collection of delegates elected by the various cities, as brought by the fact that it cannot serve as sub-ject of a predicate that requires a group subject, as shown in (42b). In contrast, IHRCs like (41) do have this privilege, as illustrated in (43) (kindly provided by Akira Watanabe, p.c.).

Parliament-Hall-loc gathered
‘Every city elected one delegate, and they gathered in Parliament-Hall.’

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Mary-Top apple-Acc bought and came home
‘Mary bought apples and came home.’
John-wa [[Mary-ga teeburu-no ue-ni proi oite-oita] no]-o tabeta. John-Top Mary-Nom table-Gen on put
no-Acc ate‘Mary put them on the table and John ate them.’

(45) Ken-wa [[Risa-ga teeburu-no ue-ni [e] oiteoita]
Ken-Top Risa-Nom table-Gen on had put
(oisisoonsa) no]-o totte tabeta
delicious-looking ones-Acc picked up and ate.’
‘Ken picked up and ate the (delicious-looking) ones that Risa had put on the table.’

The two types of IHRCs discussed in section 3 exhibited a high degree of matching between overt representation and semantics, at least insofar as the scope of overt strong Ds is concerned: in Lakhota, such Ds occur and are construed CP-externally, in Japanese,

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I have already noted in connection with example (4) that Navajo IHRCs may be indefinite, and thus satisfy one of the two diagnostics for restrictive status. That they also satisfy the other diagnostic, that is, the ability to stack with restrictive⁄intersective import, is brought out by (47) (= (15) in Barss et al. 19898).

(47) [[Hastiin łe´e´cha˛a˛’ı´ bishxash-e˛�e˛] be’eldooh ne´idiite˛�-(n)e˛�e˛] nahał’in.

‘The dog that bit the man (and) that picked up the gun is barking.’ Or:‘The man that the dog bit (and) that picked up the gun is barking.’

The wide scope of strong quantifiers associated with the IH can be appreciated in relation to (48), whose reduced version is example (107) in Faltz (1995) (with inconsequential adaptations). As Faltz stresses, this sentence does not say that John bought all of Bill’s cars, or that all the cars that John owns were purchased from Bill. Rather, the sentence is true in a situation where, say, Bill is a dealer who owns hundreds of cars, John owns eight cars, and exactly three of John’s cars were bought from Bill. In this context, the claim of good functioning is limited to those three cars, and nothing is said about the others. If the quantifier had relative-internal scope, the sentence would assert that John bought all of Bill’s cars, or that all of John’s cars were bought from Bill. Regrettably, I have not yet been able to check the behavior of other strong quantifiers in Navajo, so this point remains to be investigated in future research.

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A Novel Typology of Internally Headed Relatives 471

car 3 all fast think -REL broken.down
‘All the cars I thought were fast are broken down.’
b. *[[Hastiin łe´e´cha˛a˛’ı´ t’a´a´ ałtso bishxash-e˛�e˛] be’eldooh ne´idiita´s-(n)e˛�e˛] nahał’in.

One point I wish to stress, though, is that if what has been proposed in this section and in section 3.2. is on the right track, island-sensitivity in Japanese and Navajo IHRCs is traceable to different factors and requires different analyses (cf. with the uniform analy-sis proposed in Watanabe 2004). In Navajo, it is traceable to whatever factors require matrix scope for IHs, and in Japanese, to the need to ensure abstraction over a particular variable introduced in the semantics.

5. Multiple Types within a Single Language?

the following distribution: when the IH is strongly quantified, it takes matrix scope and the IHRC has restrictive semantics, and when it undergoes Existential Closure, it has nar-row scope and the IHRC has maximalizing semantics.

For completeness, I note that a proposal to recognize multiple types within a single language was also put forward by Kitagawa (2005) in relation to Japanese. Specifically, Kitagawa proposed three distinct types, which he characterized in terms of the IH being a definite expression, an interrogative expression, or a non-interrogative quantified expression. His motivation for this particular proposal was that, given an analysis that assumes a pronominal EH for the IHRC, a potential syntactic conflict arises with Condi-tion C of the Binding Theory. This conflict does not, however, arise for Grosu & Land-man’s (2012) analysis, which posits no pronoun outside the relative clause (recall that -no is a semantically vacuous nominalizer). More importantly, the disclosure mechanism described in section 3.2. applies effortlessly to all the types of IHs brought up by Kitaga-wa, so that from the perspective I have proposed, there is no need to recognize multiple types in Japanese.

I should like to emphasize that even the analyses of IHRCs in languages that have been addressed in some detail in this paper will unquestionably benefit from further investigation; for example, it seems important to check whether in Navajo quantifiers other than the universal one behave in the same way when associated with an IH. Con-cerning the languages that have not been analyzed here, and in particular, the SVO and VSO languages mentioned in section 2, there are good grounds for expecting that a close study of their IHRCs from a two-pronged syntax-semantics perspective might yield a treasure-trove of novel facts, with potential theoretical implications. One reason for feel-ing this way is that Hiraiwa (2005, Chapter Five), while not basing his typology on semantics (see section 2), nonetheless provides a certain amount of information about the semantics of IHRCs in Bu`li, which is highly intriguing, but insufficient for drawing firm conclusions without additional investigation.

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(51) A` tı`m d�e [A` mok a`l�ı da` ma´ngo-t�ı: me´:na´ ⁄ge`la` ⁄ye`ga`] la´. Atim ate Amok Czer bought mango-Rel.Pl all⁄some.most Dem ‘Amok bought all⁄some⁄most (of the) mangoes and Atim ate them.’

Crucially, Hiraiwa stresses that these quantifiers are construed as binding the IH with rel-ative internal scope, as reflected in the translation he provides, so that the version of (51) with ‘most’ has the crucial properties of the Japanese examples in (20)-(21). Moreover, Hiraiwa also points out that the item la´ must be viewed as a definite article (devoid of demonstrative content in this context), on the grounds that in stacked constructions (which, as noted in the preceding paragraph, have intersecting import), it can only occur with the maximal relative (contrast this state of affairs with the one noted in section 3.1. in relation to the item -nyof Mojave, which occurs with every relative in stacked constructions; see (17b)). The narrow scope of quantified IHs in conjunction with the CP-external overt definite operator points to maximalizing semantics. There is, however, an additional twist: Hiraiwa states that (51) can have not only the meaning indicated in the translation, but also a partitive meaning, to the effect that Atim ate some of the man-goes bought by Amok. This points to the possibility of a partitive construction in which a maximalizing IHRC serves as complement of a null partitive head. However, without knowing more about this language, it is impossible to tell whether such an analysis is plausible. In short, additional research on Bu`li appears to be sorely needed, and of course, on the remaining Gur languages that allow IHRCs.

Short Biography

* Correspondence address: Alexander Grosu, Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv Cam-pus, Haim Levanon St, Webb Building, 407, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: grosua@post.tau.ac.il

1 An alternative acronym that is sometimes used in the literature is HIRC, which stands for Head Internal Relative Construction.

(i) [(#All) the brilliant mathematicians that these students clearly are] should have little difficulty with this problem.

(ii)The brilliant mathematicians that these students clearly are should all have little difficulty with this problem. As discussed in detail in Grosu & Krifka (2007), the reduced version of the bracketed constituent in [i] denotes‘these’ students endowed with the property of being brilliant mathematicians, while the full version has only the pragmatically odd construal that the students at issue can be different individuals who are brilliant mathematicians. (ii), where the quantifier is in the VP, does not have this odd meaning (I am grateful to Fred Landman for this observation).

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