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The puzzling nuanced status of who free relative clauses in English: a follow-up to Patterson and Caponigro (2015)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2021

RICHARD STOCKWELL Open the ORCID record for RICHARD STOCKWELL [Opens in a new window]  and
CARSON T. SCHÜTZE Open the ORCID record for CARSON T. SCHÜTZE [Opens in a new window]
RICHARD STOCKWELL
Affiliation:
Christ Church, University of Oxford, St Aldate's, Oxford, OX1 1DP, [email protected]
CARSON T. SCHÜTZE
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, 3125 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA90095-1543, [email protected]
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Abstract

This squib challenges Patterson & Caponigro's (2015, this journal) claim that there are few acceptable free relative clauses with who. We show that free relatives with who are generally acceptable when they are ‘transparent’ free relatives or complements of a copula, and add further nuance to their findings concerning how the degree of acceptability of free relatives with who varies according to positional factors.

Keywords

standard free relativestransparent free relativesdegradation of who free relativeswh-wordscopular clauses
Type
Squib
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 185 - 202
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Our thanks to three anonymous reviewers and editor Laurel Brinton; four anonymous reviewers for LSA 2019, and the audience at our poster; Ethan Chavez, for his invaluable assistance in conducting Web and corpus searches and early stimulus development; and Ivano Caponigro, Alex Grosu, Jesse Harris, Stefan Keine, Gary Patterson, Yael Sharvit and Jon Sprouse. This research was supported by a grant from the UCLA Academic Senate Council on Research to the second author.

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