The temporal interpretation of free relatives in English and Romanian

Abstract

Abstract: Free relatives have been defined as types of relative clauses with a covert antecedent, which is semantically and syntactically active (de Vries 2002, GALR II:218), influencing the morphology of the wh- word which introduces the free relative. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look at the semantic properties of the covert antecedent and demonstrate that its temporal interpretation influences the choice of tense form that can surface in the relative clause.

Keywords

• free relatives
• covert antecedent
• temporal interpretation