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The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Reinterpreted: Subject Primacy or the Absolutive Hypothesis?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Barbara A. Fox
Barbara A. Fox*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to re-examine constraints on relative clause formation in languages of the world. The main tasks of the study are thus two-fold: to present a new formulation of one of the main constraints on relativization, and to challenge an assumption of the most robust typological interpretation of relative clause constraints to date—the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1987, pp. 856 - 870
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Alan Bell, Susanna Cumming, Scott DeLancey, Jack Du Bois, Mark Durie, Ellen Prince, and Sandra Thompson for their insightful comments on the ideas presented here. I would also like to thank Judy Koslov and Stith Bennett for their help with the statistical analysis. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Pacific Linguistics Conference. November 1986.

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