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Constraints on the distribution of NP clauses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Alexander Grosu and
Sandra A. Thompson
Alexander Grosu
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
Sandra A. Thompson
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

Five earlier accounts of a certain class of restrictions barring noun clauses from environments that are in some sense ‘internal’ are argued to be empirically deficient in a number of ways. An alternative proposal is put forward with a view to (i) remedying the empirical inadequacies of the earlier analyses and (ii) predicting what types of languages exhibit the restrictions at issue. It is further argued that the proposed alternative restrictions exhibit non-trivial correlations with independently established facts of language processing, and that the latter can explicate to an important degree the existence of the former in the languages of the world.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1977, pp. 104 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by Linguistic Society of America

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