We are very happy to announce that our lab member Chaoyi Chen successfully defended his dissertation titled ‘The Syntax and Semantics of Headless Relative Clauses’ (abstract attached below). Chaoyi will be joining the faculty at Hunan University in China this fall semester. Chaoyi was one of the founding members of our lab, and while the lab will miss him dearly, we are also very excited for his new chapter in Hunan! Congratulations, Dr. Chen! 🎉
Information about Chaoyi’s dissertation:
Title: The syntax and semantics of headless relative clauses
Committee: Mark Baker (co-chair), Yimei Xiang (co-chair), Dorothy Ahn, Ivano Caponigro (UCSD)
This dissertation advances our understanding of headless relatives by addressing four syntactic and semantic issues. First, I examine the syntactic transformation of nominal headless relatives from CPs to NPs/DPs. Through a detailed cross-linguistic analysis, I propose that this transformation requires a categorical [N]/[D] feature provided by the daughters of the headless-relative node. In [+wh] headless relatives, overt fronted wh-phrases supply the [N]/[D] feature, whereas in [-wh] headless relatives, external nominal heads can provide this feature.
Next, I explore whether all arguments within a headless relative clause can be equally relativized when they are phonologically null. A preference for object readings over subject readings is observed in Mandarin doubly-gapped headless relatives. I argue that this asymmetry stems from a general preference for nested movements over crossing movements, as well as the unavailability of generic null objects with most Mandarin verbs.
I then turn to the semantic composition of headless relative clauses. I observe that pied-piping in English free relatives is less acceptable than in corresponding wh-questions and headed relative clauses. Based on this observation, I propose a compositional analysis in which the meaning of free relatives is sensitive to the form of their fronted strings.
Finally, I extend the discussion to the readings headless relatives can have and their parallels with modified bare nouns. Drawing on the similarities between English free relatives and English modified bare nouns, I argue that the distribution of kind and non-kind readings in these two constructions should be captured in a unified manner.
