Relative clauses and CP nominalization in Ndebele
Asia Pietraszko
January 2017
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003273
I argue that embedded clauses in Ndebele (Bantu, Zimbabwe) are nominalized — they project a DP shell. I provide syntactic and morphophonological evidence for DP shell in verb-complement clauses, noun-complement clauses and relative clauses in Ndebele. The DP-shell hypothesis is further shown to explain i) an asymmetry between verb- and noun-complement clauses, and ii) a similarity between noun-complement clauses and relative clauses. Unlike verb-attached clauses, noun-attached clauses are introduced by a functional head: the linker “a”. The linking structure of relative clauses additionally derives the apparently idiosyncratic paradigm of relative agreement prefixes from regular phonological rules.