Ambiguous Structures of Relative Clauses1

There is an ongoing debate in generative linguistics on which account is appropriate for relative clauses between two competing approaches: the raising and the matching approach. In the former, the relationship of the external head with the internal one is established in terms of derivation. The internal head is assumed to originate in the relative clause and then moves outside the relative clause in the course of the derivation. In contrast, in the latter, both an external and an internal head of the relative clause do exist separately. In particular, the external head can be assumed to be late merged outside the CP, whereas the internal head is subject to deletion under the identity condition at all. The goal of this paper is to argue that it is vain to pursue a unified account for relative clauses. Rather it may fare well to have both of the raising and the matching approach in order. In that each account is in charge of different sets of syntactic and semantic environments, showing the complementary distribution.