Restrictive Relatives in Modern Hebrew

An examination of Hebrew relative clauses against the background of theoretical developments & grammatical models proposed recently; an account is proposed in terms of the extended standard theory & the government binding model. It is shown that traditional problems in the account of relative clauses in languages that allow for a resumptive pronoun strategy may be solved using these models. Properties of relative clause constructions that include fronting are considered. It is concluded that fronted pronouns functioning as operators are moved to COMP, exhibiting the characteristics of wh-movement. The complementizer system is considered & a rule of complementizer indexing is proposed, the rule accounting for the distribution of complementizers & explaining the distribution of deletion from COMP. Subject relatives are discussed: these differ from O relatives in not allowing a resumptive pronoun strategy in certain contexts. N. Chomsky's binding conditions (Lectures on Government and Binding, Dordrecht: Foris, 1981) are invoked to explain the distribution of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses, predicting the right range of facts & motivating some modifications in the definition of binding domains. 35 References. Modified AA