Towards a non-elliptical analysis of verbless relative adjuncts

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of a set of Romanian and French adjuncts which are usually referred to as elliptical relative clauses. Despite the resemblance they bear to non-restrictive partitive relative clauses, these adjuncts cannot be analyzed as elliptical relative clauses for both syntactic and semantic reasons. A non-elliptical analysis in a construction-based grammar is then provided, which crucially relies on the two notions of fragment and cluster.

Keywords

• ellipsis
• fragment
• relative clause
• Romanian
• French