Unifying Japanese relative clauses: copy-chains and context-sensitivity

We offer a new, unified approach to the derivation and interpretation of head-external, head-internal, and heretofore understudied doubly-headed relative clauses in Japanese. Our proposal is motivated by new data on the interpretation of these different forms of relative clauses with quantificational heads, in different contexts. Head-internal and doubly-headed relative clauses are interpreted as definite descriptions with their quantificational head interpreted in their surface, relative-clause-internal positions. We show that the complex patterns of possible interpretations, as well as the shape of observed inter-speaker variation, are derived by interpreting definite descriptions using a maximal informativeness semantics and a simple assumption regarding the role of contextual information, which we call the Salient Sets Restriction. Syntactically, we propose a novel DP head-raising derivation for relative clauses that takes advantage of the Copy Theory of movement and the late-merger of relative clauses. This allows for the unification of head-internal and doubly-headed relativization strategies with the familiar head-external form, which would otherwise not be possible. We believe this approach is suitable for head-raising relative clauses in other languages as well, including English. Our proposal avoids some complications of previous head-raising derivations, instead taking advantage of independently motivated mechanisms of copy-chain resolution at LF. This article is part of the special collection: Internally-headed Relative Clauses