Interdisciplinary Approaches to Relative Clauses

Convener: Dora Alexopoulou (Lille/Cambridge)

Relative clauses are complex constructions grammatically, yet very frequent and highly productive crosslinguistically. Understanding their properties is, thus, fundamental for theories of grammar, linguistic typology, language acquisition and processing. Many of their structural and interpretive properties have now been investigated and there is a growing body of work on their acquisition and processing. However, there have been insufficient efforts to integrate insights and results across different subdisciplines. Building on the success of the preparatory “Workshop on the Typology, Acquisition and Processing of Relative Clauses” (Leipzig 2005, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), the conference aims to bring together researchers investigating relative clauses from different perspectives: linguistic typology, grammatical theory, processing, first and second language acquisition, computational/corpus linguistics and historical linguistics.