Relativization strategies in the languages of Europe

This paper examines the relativization patterns found in twenty-six languages of Europe, focusing on the strategies used to encode the relativized item. We provide a critical overview of extant classifications of these strategies, and discuss the distribution of these strategies across different syntactic roles. We present data on roles less accessible to relativization, such as possessors, or not included in the Accessibility Hierarchy for relativization, such as time circumstantials. These data can be accounted for in terms of a number of factors related to the syntax and semantics of the head noun, rather than the syntactic role of the relativized item as such. These factors also account for a number of recurrent parallelisms between the relativization of time circumstantials and temporal clauses.