Whatever his arguments, whatever relatives are headed relatives. A reply to Caponigro’s reply

TitreWhatever his arguments, whatever relatives are headed relatives. A reply to Caponigro’s reply
Publication TypeArticle de revue
AuthorsCecchetto, Carlo, and Caterina Donati
JournalLinguistic Inquiry
Mots-clésfree relatives; full relatives; ever-relatives; labeling
Abstract

This is a reply to Caponigro 2019, which argues that the phrase structure theory proposed by Donati and Cecchetto (2011;2015) falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses. The core of that paper is a criticism concerning the reliability of the data that were taken as evidence for D&C’s analysis of ever-relatives as not being free relatives. This paper reports the results of 5 controlled experiments on English and Italian involving about 200 participants, focusing on five main properties that set apart free relatives from full relatives (occurrence with a complementizer and with a relative pronoun, infinitival use, absolute use, adverbial use). Crucially, ever-relatives do not pattern with free relatives in any of these five domains, either in Italian or in English. This clearly shows that ever-relatives are not a counterexample against D&C’s phrase structure theory. Another potential counterexample, Romanian free relatives, is also discussed.