Constructional Constraints in English Free Relative Constructions

As a subtype of English relative clause constructions, free relative constructions like what John ate in I ate what John ate exhibit complicated syntactic and semantic properties. In particular, the constructions have mixed properties of nominal and verbal: they have the internal syntax of sentence and the external syntax of noun phrase. This paper provides a constraint-based approach to these mixed constructions, and shows that simple constructional constraints are enough to capture their complexities. The paper begins by surveying the properties of the constructions. In discusses two types(Specific and nonspecific) of free relatives, their ,lexical restrictions nominal properties and behavior with respect to extraposition, piped piping and stacking Following these it sketches the basic framework of the HPSG(Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) which is of relevance in this paper. As the main part, the paper presents a constraint- based analysis in which tight interactions between grammatical constructions and a rich network of inheritance relations play important roles in accounting for the basic as well as complex properties of the constructions is question.