The Syntax and Semantics of Antecedentless １Relatives in English

This work is concerned with two related problems: how to explain the derivation and interpretation of English relatives whose head nouns are missing and how to teach these relatives to L2 learners in relation to learnability. A descriptive account of the external distribution of antecedentless relative clauses, called ARCs, and the grammatical functions that the relative pronouns can take in these ARCs naturally leads to a claim that all examples of ARCs involve base-generated empty head nouns whose semantic contents are later fully recovered at the Logical Form. Given the learnability problem, it is further claimed that ARCs in general must be learned after fused relatives are learned and ARCs whose missing head nouns are recovered from linguistic antecedents must be presented before ARCs whose missing head nouns are recovered from the meanings of the constructions themselves.