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Familiar when-relatives and peculiar when-relatives in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2022

WENSHAN LI Open the ORCID record for WENSHAN LI [Opens in a new window]  and
JIANG LIU
WENSHAN LI
Affiliation:
School of Chinese Language and Literature Xi'an International Studies University Xi'an Shaanxi 710128 China drlistudio@163.com
JIANG LIU
Affiliation:
Department of Languages and Cultures Linguistic Program University of South Carolina Columbia South Carolina 29208 USA jiangliu@mailbox.sc.edu
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Abstract

Typical headed relatives in English include a relative pronoun which takes the head as its antecedent. However, some modifying when-clauses in this language are peculiar relatives in that their heads are not the antecedent of when and they do not even have temporal referents. In view of the peculiarity of this type of relative clause, a novel account of the syntactic generation and interpretation of temporal when-clauses is pro- posed. Under this account four lexical entries of when, which have different semantic and syntactic properties, are recognized. The semantics of various whens are analyzed based on existing work, while the syntactic properties of different whens in non-interrogative sentences are characterized in the form of lexical information, which is implemented in the framework of Dynamic Syntax. The work in this article enriches the description of the diversity of relatives and suggests that the analysis of relatives can be unified semantically but not syntactically.

Keywords

whenrelative clausestemporal adverbialDynamic Syntax
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 93 - 119
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Copyright
Copyright © The Authors, 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

1

The research was funded by the Social Science Foundation of China (21BYUY152). We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to James Watts for his help with the editing work. All remaining errors are our own.

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