Competition Between 'Who' and 'Which' in Slavic Light-Headed Relative Clauses
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11210%2F17%3A10426259" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11210/17:10426259 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=dHRkW8TXcy" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=dHRkW8TXcy</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
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Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Competition Between 'Who' and 'Which' in Slavic Light-Headed Relative Clauses
Original language description
The relativization systems of most Slavic languages include relative pronouns that can be conventionally labelled as 'who' and 'which' and differ in a number of logically independent parameters (etymology, animacy, grammaticality of attributive contexts, and morphological distinction for number and gender). Prior research has shown that the choice between 'who' and 'which' in Slavic languages is largely dependent on the head type. Some of the languages allow the 'who' pronouns to be used with pronominal heads, but not with nouns in the head, while in others, the pronominal heads in the plural are also ungrammatical with the pronoun 'who.' The present study aims to complement the available qualitative data on the distribution of the relativizers with quantitative data and to propose a unified account for all the observed tendencies. A corpus-based study was conducted in order to establish language-internal statistical tendencies comparable to the known grammaticality restrictions. The results show much agreement between the qualitative and quantitative tendencies. Thus, the head 'those,' unlike the head 'that,' is incompatible with the relativizer 'who' in Slovak, Polish, Upper Sorbian, and Lower Sorbian languages, while the same tendency is quantitative in Czech, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and the older varieties of Russian. Corpus data suggest that there is also a stronger tendency for the relative pronoun 'who' to be avoided with the head 'those' than with the head 'all.' One more relevant parameter is the semantic type of the clause, maximalizing semantics being the preferred option for 'who.' I suggest that all these and some other tendencies can be subsumed under a macro-parameter of the extent to which the head is integrated into the relative clause.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
J<sub>imp</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60203 - Linguistics
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
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Others
Publication year
2017
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Name of the periodical
Slověne. International Journal of Slavic Studies
ISSN
2304-0785
e-ISSN
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Volume of the periodical
5
Issue of the periodical within the volume
1
Country of publishing house
RU - RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Number of pages
30
Pages from-to
118-147
UT code for WoS article
000424645400004
EID of the result in the Scopus database
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