ABSTRACT
The relative clause (or RC hereafter) – along with basic word order and case marking – occupies a very prominent place in linguistic typology. Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) cross-linguistic study, which deals with none other than grammatical constraints on relativization or relative clause formation, is regarded as ‘one of the most influential works in the language universals literature’ (Fox 1987: 856). The RC construction, as is generally understood, consists of two components: the head noun and the restricting clause. The semantic function of the head noun is to establish a set of entities, which may be called the domain of relativization, following Keenan and Comrie (1977: 63), whereas that of the restricting clause is to identify a subset of the domain – a one-member subset in the case of (1) below – by imposing a semantic condition on the domain of relativization referred to by the head noun. In the following example the head noun is the girl and the restricting clause whom Miss Edge coached.
The girl whom Miss Edge coached won the game.
