Relative Clause Deletion (Collins 2015)

 The goal of this paper is to investigate the ambiguity of sentences like (1):

(1) At the party, I saw three boys who I know and one girl.

On one interpretation, I propose (1) has the following structure:

(2) At the party, I saw three boys who I know and one girl <who I know>

The  angled  brackets  <…>  indicate  that  the  enclosed  string  is  present  syntactically  but  not pronounced. I will call the process by which the relative clause in (2) is not pronounced relative clause deletion.

Relative Clause Deletion

Collins, Chris. 2015. Relative Clause Deletion. In Ángel J. Gallego and Dennis Ott (eds.). 50 Years Later: Reflections on Chomsky’s Aspects. Vol. 77 of MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 57-69. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.