Evidence for head raising in Kiswahili relative clauses

Abstract

The author presents evidence from Kiswahili supporting a head-raising analysis recently proposed in Kayne (1994) and Bianchi (1999), in which the relative clause is generated as a complement of the determiner. Three kinds of evidence are presented: (1) selectional relations between demonstratives and some relative clauses; (2) quantified noun phrase-pronoun binding, in which the bound pronoun appears inside the head of the relative clause while its binder is located in the relative clause; and (3) relativization of objects comprising part of idiomatic expressions. The evidence supports both the head-raising hypothesis and the determiner complementation hypothesis.

Keywords

• Swahili
• head-raising
• relative clause