To Raise or Not to Raise: the Case of Finnish Restrictive Relative Clauses

Abstract

Relative clause constructions have received very little attention in Finnish grammars. The purpose of this paper is to provide some tools for distinguishing between restrictive and appositive relatives in Finnish, and to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the “standard” and raising analyses of restrictive relatives in that language. It shows that both lines of analysis are problematic for the analysis of a highly inflectional language like Finnish. The paper also contains a brief account of relative clause extraposition constructions: it points out problems in Kayne’s (1994) and Bianchi’s (1999) analysis of such data, and proposes instead that extraposition constructions, just like possessive constructions, contain a D head selecting another DP as its complement.