3 (#LSA2025) papers to read about relative clauses
I LOVE RELATIVE CLAUSES. I don't work on them, I just think they're neat!!!!!
The semantics of multi-headed wh correlatives in Georgian, Natasha Thalluri. Keywords: formal semantics, multiple wh-questions, correlatives, Georgian
Free relatives free from silent operators, Setayesh Dashti. Keywords: free relatives, syntax-semantics interface, Old Avestan, relativization
Missing the cues: LLMs’ insensitivity to semantic biases in relative clause attachment, Russell Scheinberg, So Young Lee, Ameeta Agrawal. Keywords: LLMs, Relative clause attachment ambiguity, semantic bias, prompt format effect, prompt sensitivity
I think it's super interesting how semantics-y all three of these are! Also surprised and happy to see another LLM analysis in this batch - there are a number of papers this year about how LLMs are similar or different from humans in how they produce and respond to language. Super interesting stuff! This would be a super fun batch of papers to read together for a semantics reading group.
How do languages form relative clauses like “the man that ate bread went home”.
Relative pronoun/particle/complementizer - “the man [that/who ate bread] went home”. Typical of Indo-European, Uralic and Semitic languages.
Correlative relative (non-reduction) - “the man [who ate bread], [that man] went home or "the man [he ate bread] went home” - this strategy involves an anaphor, repeating the antecedent with a noun/pronoun. Pronoun retention is also lumped in here. This strategy occurs in Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, etc.), in Mande languages (e.g Bambara in Mali), Yoruba, Lakhota, Warao, Xerente, Walpiri, etc.
Nominalized/participial relative - “the [bread eating] man went home" or "the [bread eaten] man went home" - I lumped this two together because the behaviour is very similar - used in Turkic, Mongolic, Koreanic, Dravidian, and Bantu languages.
Genitive relative - “[ate bread]'s man went home" - used in Sino-Tibetan, Khmer, Tagalog, Minangkabau, and Aymara.
Relative affix - “the man [ate-REL bread] went home” - used in Seri, Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages and Maale (Omotic).
Adjunction - “the man [ate bread] went home”, with no overt marker just justapositions modifying the main clause. Used in Japanese, Thai, Shan, Lao, Malagasy.
Internally headed relative - "[the man ate the bread] went home", the nucleous is in the relative clause itself. Used in Navajo, Apache, Haida.
If you know about the languages left in blank, please let me know!
Could you help me with el que, la que lo que,los que,las que and el cual,la cual,lo cual,los cual,las cual.
What you’re talking about are “relative clauses”, and they’re much simpler than you’d think
The equivalents in English are “that” and “which”. This is because they’re related to the question words qué “what” and cuál/cuáles “which / which ones”
Secondly, this might help make it a little simpler:
el que = el cual
la que = la cual
lo que = lo cual
los que = los cuales
las que = las cuales
How it works is similar to English. You normally say “that”, but in formal or fancy situations you’d say “which” (or “whom”)
You use a relative clause in the context of adding some side description in your sentence. It’s called “relative” because it “relates” to the subject you just mentioned:
La mujer que conozco. = The woman that I know.
La mujer que me dio el libro. = The woman that gave me the book.
La mujer que conozco, la que me dio el libro, es mi vecina. = The woman I know, the one that gave me the book, (she) is my neighbor.
El hombre que tiene traje puesto... = The man in the suit...
El hombre alto y calvo... = The tall bald man...
El hombre alto y calvo, el que tiene traje puesto, es mi jefe. = The tall bald man, the one wearing the suit, (he) is my boss.
The use of el cual or la cual is more typically done with inanimate objects and it implies more distance and gets used as “which”
Motivo por el cual... = The reason for that / The reason for which / The reason being...
Razón por la cual... = The reason for that / The reason for which / The reason being...
Los países con los cuales cooperamos... = The countries with which we cooperate
Las empresas a las cuales se refiere... = The companies which are being referred to...
Los problemas de los cuales hablamos... = The problems we are talking about... / The problems of which we are speaking...
Los medios mediante los cuales obtenemos nuestra información... = The media by which we obtain our information...
La mesa, encima de la cual... = The table, upon which...
El sofá, debajo del cual... = The sofa, underneath which...
And so on. The el cual, los cual, la cual, las cuales is really good for sounding authoritative and making a point because you sound fancy
...
Where it’s a little more in depth is lo que vs lo cual
The lo que [neuter gender] is used as a stand-in for something, so usually when you see “what” as a noun, that’s lo que. It exists in the absence of a noun, so it’s neuter/neutral gender or agender:
Lo que no entiendo... = What I don’t understand... / The thing that I don’t understand...
Lo que el viento se llevó. = Gone With the Wind. [lit. “what the wind took with it”]
Eso no es lo que quiero decir. = That’s not what I mean.
Lo que me molesta... = What bothers me...
lo cual isn’t that common but it’s used to refer to a thing or concept that was discussed earlier
El hombre llevó a alguien a cuestas, lo cual me resultó extraño. = The man gave someone a piggyback ride, which I thought was weird.
Y la otra estudiante mintió y me echó la culpa, lo cual me enfadó mucho. = And the other student lied and she blamed me, which made me really angry.
I personally would have used y eso instead of lo cual... like y eso me resultó extraño “and that was weird to me”
I don’t usually use or see lo cual that often, it feels very fancy
An interesting question found its way into our inbox recently, asking about relative clauses in Swedish, and wondering whether their unique characteristics might pose a problem for some of the linguistic theories we’ve talked about on our channel. So if you want a discussion of syntax, Swedish, and subjacency (with some eye-tracking thrown in), this is for you!
So yes, there is a hypothesis that Swedish relative clauses break one of the basic principles by which language is thought to work. In particular, it’s been claimed that one of the governing principles of language is Subjacency, which basically says that when words move around in a sentence, like when a statement gets turned into a question, those words can’t move around without limit. Instead, they have to hop around in small skips and jumps to get to their destination. To make this more concrete, consider the sentence in (1).
(1) Where did Nick think Carol was from?
The idea goes that a sentence like this isn’t formed by moving the word “where” directly from the end to the beginning, as in (2). Instead, we suppose that it happens in steps, by moving it to the beginning of the embedded clause first, and then moving it all the way to the front of the sentence as a whole, shown in (3).
(2a) Did Nick think Carol was from where?
(2b) Where did Nick think Carol was from _?
(3a) Did Nick think Carol was from where?
(3b) Did Nick think where Carol was from _?
(3c) Where did Nick think _ Carol was from _?
One of the advantages of supposing that this is how questions are formed is that it’s easy to explain why some questions just don’t work. The question in (4) sounds pretty weird — so weird that it’s hard to know what it’s even supposed to mean. (The asterisk marks it as unacceptable.)
(4) *Where did Nick ask who was from _?
The explanation behind this is that the intermediate step that “where” normally would have made on its way to the front is rendered impossible because the “who” in the middle gets in its way. It’s sitting in exactly the spot inside the structure of the sentence that “where” would have used to make its pit stop.
More generally, Subjacency is used as an explanation for ‘islands,’ which are the parts of sentences where words like “where” and “when” often seem to get stranded. And one of the most robust kinds of island found across the world’s languages is the relative clause, which is why we can’t ever turn (5) into (6).
(5) Nick is friends with a hero who lives on another planet
(6) *Where is Nick friends with a hero who lives _?
Surprisingly, Swedish — alongside other mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian — seems to break this rule into pieces. The sentence in (7) doesn’t have a direct translation into English that sounds very natural.
(7a) Såna blommor såg jag en man som sålde på torget
(7b) Those kinds of flowers saw I a man that sold in square-the (gloss)
(7c) *Those kinds of flowers, I saw a man that sold in the square
So does that mean we have to toss all our progress out the window, and start from scratch? Well, let’s not be too hasty. For one, it’s worth noting that even the English version of the sentence can be ‘rescued’ using what’s called a resumptive pronoun, filling the gap left behind by the fronted noun phrase “those kinds of flowers.”
(8) Those kinds of flowers, I saw a man that sold them in the square
For many speakers, the sentence in (8) actually sounds pretty good, as long as the pronoun “them” is available to plug the leak, so to speak. At the very least, these kinds of sentences do find their way into conversational speech a whole lot. So, whether a supposedly inviolable rule gets broken or not isn’t as black-and-white as it might appear. What’s maybe a more compelling line of thinking is that what look like violations of these rules on the surface can turn out not to be, once we dig a little deeper. For instance, the sentence in (9), found in Quebec French, might seem surprising. It looks like there’s a missing piece after “exploser” (“blow up”), inside of a relative clause, that corresponds directly to “l'édifice” (“the building”) — so, right where a gap shouldn’t be possible.
(9a) V'là l'édifice qu'y a un gars qui a fait exploser _
(9b) *This is the building that there is a man who blew up
But that embedded clause has some very strange properties that have given linguists reasons to think it’s something more exotic. For one, the sentence in (9) above only functions with what’s known as a stage-level predicate — so, a verb that describes an action that takes place over a relatively short period of time, like an explosion. This is in contrast to an individual-level predicate, which can apply over someone’s whole lifetime. When we replace one kind of predicate with another, what comes out as garbage in English now sounds equally terrible in French.
(10a) *V’là l'édifice qu'y a un employé qui connaît _
(10b) *This is the building that there is an employee who knows
Interestingly, stage-level predicates seem to fundamentally change the underlying structures of these sentences, so that other apparently inviolable rules completely break down. For instance, with a stage-level predicate, we can now fit a proper name in there, which is something that English (and many other languages) simply forbid.
(11a) Y a Jean qui est venu
(11b) *There is John who came (cannot say out-of-the-blue to mean “John came”)
For this reason, along with some other unusual syntactic properties that come hand-in-hand, it’s supposed that these aren’t really relative clauses at all. And not being relative clauses, the “who” in (9) isn’t actually occupying a spot that any other words have to pass through on their way up the tree. That is, movement isn’t blocked like how it normally would be in a genuine relative clause.
Still, Swedish has famously resisted any good analysis. Some researchers have tried to explain the problem away by claiming that what look like relative clauses are actually small clauses — the “Carol a friend” part of the sentence below — since small clauses are happy to have words move out of them.
(12a) Nick considers Carol a friend
(12b) Who does Nick consider _ a friend?
But the structures that words can move out of in Swedish clearly have more in common with noun phrases containing relative clauses, than clauses in and of themselves. In (13), it just doesn’t make sense to think of the verb “träffat” (“meet”) as being followed by a clause, in the same way it did for “consider.”
(13a) Det har jag inte träffat någon som gjort
(13b) that have I not met someone that done
(13c) *That, I haven’t met anyone who has done
So what’s next? Here, it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees. Languages show amazing variation, but given all the ways it could have been, language as a whole also shows incredible uniformity. It’s truly remarkable that almost all the languages we’ve studied carefully so far, regardless of how distant they are from each other in time and space, show similar island effects. Even if Swedish turns out to be a true exception after all is said and done, there’s such an overwhelming tendency in the opposite direction, it begs for some kind of explanation. If our theory is wrong, it means we need to build an even better one, not that we need no theory at all.
And yet the situation isn’t so dire. A recent eye tracking study — the first of its kind to address this specific question — suggests a more nuanced set of facts. Generally, when experimental subjects read through sentences, looking for open spots where a dislocated word might have come from as they process what they’re seeing, they spend relatively less time fixated on the parts of sentences that are syntactic islands, vs. those that aren’t. In other words, by default, readers in these experiments tend to ignore the possibility of finding gaps inside syntactic islands, since our linguistic knowledge rules that out. And in this study, it was found that sentences like the ones in (7) and (13), which seem to show that Swedish can move words out from inside a relative clause, tend to fall somewhere between full-on syntactic islands and structures that typically allow for movement, in terms of where readers look, and for how long. This suggests that Swedish relative clauses are what you might call ‘weak islands,’ letting you move words out of them in some circumstances, but not in others. And this is in line with the fact that not all kinds of constituents (in this case, “why”) can be moved out of these relative clauses, as the unacceptability of the sentence in (14) shows. (In English, the sentence cannot be used to ask why people were late.)
(14a) *Varföri känner du många som blev sena till festeni?
(14b) Why know you many who were late to party-the
(14c) *Why do you know many people who were late to the party?
For reasons we don’t yet fully understand, relative clauses in Swedish don’t obviously pattern with relative clauses in English. At the same time, the variation between them isn’t so deep that we’re forced to throw out everything we know about how language works. The search for understanding is an ongoing process, and sometimes the challenges can seem impossible, but sooner or later we usually find a way to puzzle out the problem. And that can only ever serve to shed more light on what we already know!
A bit ago I introduced some interrogative, indefinite, and negative pronouns for Ori. Related to these forms are relative pronouns, which are used to create relative clauses.
In Ori, relative clauses are head-initial, despite the generally left-branching (head-final) nature of Ori. This means that the head of the relative clause (the main noun) is placed before the relative clause (as it is done in French or English, for example).
The relative pronouns are basically all formed from verions of the interrogative pronouns, but with an additional suffix of -a at the end of the word.
nalar - ‘who?’ --> nalara ‘who’ (rel.)
nabel - ‘what?’ --> nabela ‘which, that’
nanye - ‘where?’ --> nanya ‘where’ (rel.)
nasya - ‘why?’ --> nasya ‘for which reason’ (rel.)
natin - ‘how?’ --> natina ‘in which way’ (rel.)
nalin - ‘when?’ --> nalina ‘when’ (rel.)
The trisyllable forms of the relative pronouns (nalara, nabela, natina, and nalina) also have short forms that are used more commonly in eveyday speech.
nalara --> na-
nabela --> naba-
natina --> nata-
nalina --> nana-
~
Relative pronouns take the same case that the shared noun uses in the embedded clause. In the below sentence,
Tu-hema-s na-s tet lyen-besorpa-tan nimas rya
def.art-woman-nom who-nom makes def.art-clay.pots-acc mother-nom be
‘The woman who makes the clay pots is a mother’
-
Lye-besorpa-s naba-t elucu-m cyan truma-s rya.
def.art-clay.pot-acc which-acc choose-1sg pst.perf red-nom be
‘The clay pot that I chose is red’
-
nanya, nasya, nalina/nana are all often used without a case marker at all.
In our episode on relative clauses, we focused on restrictive relative clauses, which we argued behave a lot like adjectives — specifically, intersective adjectives like “broken” and “curly.” In other words, if we think of both relative clauses and the nouns they combine with as sets, then the meanings we get out of connecting them together are whatever those sets share in common, or their intersection.
(1) “the broken step” ≈ “the step that’s broken”
And it makes sense to suppose that these kinds of relative clauses typically sit inside noun phrases, somewhere that’s neither too far up nor too far down the tree. After all, we can freely separate a relative clause from its host noun with a prepositional phrase, as in “the step in the middle of the staircase that’s broken,” suggesting the relative clause isn’t all that close to it to begin with. At the same time, the definite article seems to have a significant influence over everything that follows it, since out of all the steps and all the things that are broken, “the” picks out the one thing that’s both; this suggests that the relative clause is somewhere below the determiner.
But this isn’t the only kind of relative clause we find. If you want some more kinds of relative clauses, check below:
Consider the following sentence:
(2) Luke’s dad, who used to be a cheerleader, is also quite the prankster.
It doesn’t look like the relative clause “who used to be a cheerleader” is really restricting the meaning of “Luke’s dad.” In fact, if anything, it seems to be adding to it! In this case, we have what’s called a non-restrictive relative clause, which is often fenced off from the rest of the sentence with a slight pause (represented with commas).* And while restrictive relative clauses are generally thought of as combining meaningfully with the words around them, many linguists view non-restrictive relative clauses as being semantically separate from the rest of the sentence, as a kind of afterthought. The meaning of the sentence above, then, could be paraphrased like this:
(3) Luke’s dad is quite the prankster. Note that he used to be a cheerleader.
And non-restrictive relative clauses seem to be free of the influence of determiners. A sentence like “The President of France, who was recently elected to office, is relatively young” doesn’t seem to imply that there are a whole bunch of French Presidents, and that only one of them was recently elected; instead, the relative clause applies to everything that came before it — the whole of “the President of France,” including the definite article. So, we get a different picture of what these sorts of structures probably look like, with the non-restrictive relative clause attaching to some node sitting above the determiner phrase.
Finally, we see another brand of embedded clause that, on the surface, looks an awful lot like what we’ve seen already. Consider the following noun phrase:
(4) Phil’s worry that Luke won’t get into college
Notice, though, that unlike the relative clauses we’ve been seeing up until now, this one doesn’t have any gap in it; that is, it can stand on its own as a complete sentence.
(5) Luke won’t get into college.
These kinds of embedded clauses, which provide content to the nouns they modify, are known as complement clauses, because they look so much like the complements of verbs like “worry” and “claim” — found in full sentences like the one below.
(6) Phil’s worried that Luke won’t get into college.
And given their name, it seems reasonable to suppose they occupy a spot inside noun phrases that’s similar to the complements of these kinds of verbs, cozying up right next to the head of the phrase.
However, it turns out that this can’t quite be true. Not only are complement clauses able to follow restrictive relative clauses, it actually sounds kind of weird when they don’t! (And this is a pattern that holds across languages.)
(7a) I don’t believe the rumour that I heard this morning that he’ll move.
(7b) ??I don’t believe the rumour that he’ll move that I heard this morning.
Complement clauses even seem to work well after non-restrictive relative clauses.
(8) There’s a rumour, which I heard this morning, that he’ll be moving.
So complement clauses end up looking a lot like more some species of non-restrictive relative clauses than anything else (including real complements), meaning they probably connect up to a part of the tree that’s higher up than your average relative clause.
It really does take all kinds!
*Some insist on another difference between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses: that while either one may use relative pronouns like “who” or “where,” only restrictive relative clauses may use “that,” while only non-restrictive relative clauses may use “which.” But there are plenty of counter-examples to this supposed rule, as in Nietzsche’s famous quote “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” And though non-restrictive relative clauses using “that” are very much an endangered species, they can still be spotted in the wild from time to time.
