TY - CHAP A1 - Poschmann, Claudia A1 - Bargmann, Sascha A1 - Götze, Christopher A1 - Holler, Anke A1 - Sailer, Manfred A1 - Webelhuth, Gert A1 - Zimmermann, Thomas Ede T1 - Split-antecedent relative clauses and the symmetry of predicates T2 - Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, Vol. 2 / eds. Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt. Berlin, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft: ZAS papers in linguistics ; Nr. 61 N2 - This paper presents the results of two experiments in German testing the acceptability of (non-)restrictive relative clauses (NRCs/RRCs) with split antecedents (SpAs). According to Moltmann (1992), SpAs are only grammatical if their parts occur within the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and if they have identical grammatical functions. Non-conjoined SpAs that form the subject and the object of a transitive verb are predicted to be ungrammatical. Our study shows that the acceptability of such examples improves significantly if the predicate that relates the parts of the SpA is symmetric. Moreover, it suggests that NRCs and RRCs behave differently in these cases with respect to the SpA-construal. We can make sense of this observation if we follow Winter (2016) in assuming that transitive symmetric predicates have to be analyzed as unary collective predicates and thus provide a collective antecedent for the RC at the semantic (not the syntactic) level. As we will argue, this accounts for some of the disagreement we found in the literature and gives us new insights into both the semantics of symmetric predicates and the semantics of NRCs. KW - non-restrictive relative clause KW - restrictive relative clause KW - symmetric predicate KW - split antecedent Y1 - 2020 UR - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/55844 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-558446 SN - 1435-9588 SN - 0947-7055 SP - 253-270 PB - Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) CY - Berlin ER -