Specification of D Derives Variation in Relative Clauses

Zhiyu Mia Gong, Eszter Ótott-Kovács

Keywords: Relative Clauses, Features of D, Genitive case, Turkic, Mongolic

TL;DR: The syntactic differences in Turkic & Mongolic relative clauses can be derived from the features of the modified noun phrase's D head.

Abstract:

Several Turkic and Mongolic languages possess a type of genitive-subject relative clauses (GSRCs) where the relative clause (RC) subject is marked with genitive case, and agreement with the genitive-marked subject appears on the modified noun phrase (Hale 2002; Kornfilt 2008, 2015). This study examines GSRCs in Kazakh (Turkic) and Khalkha Mongolian (Mongolic), two languages that exhibit superficially similar structures but differ fundamentally in their underlying syntactic configurations.

We show that these syntactic differences are derived from variation in the properties of the D head of the modified noun phrase, specifically: (i) EPP, and (ii) the C-selection properties of D. By comparing Kazakh and Khalkha, two languages with otherwise highly parallel syntactic profiles, we create an ideal test case to isolate how these properties of D drive cross-linguistic variation in GSRCs. We demonstrate that combining the (i) EPP and the (ii) C-selection parameters gives rise to four language-types with distinct properties.

Submission Number: 59