Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages

Ivano Caponigro, Harold Torrence, Roberto Zavala Maldonado

"This volume presents the collective work of a team of twenty-one scholars that have investigated headless relative clauses in fifteen languages from five language families-all Mesoamerican but one. Headless relative clauses have received little attention in the linguistic literature, despite the many morpho-syntactic and semantic puzzles they raise within and across languages and for our understanding of human language in general. Headless relative clauses have been even more neglected in the study of Mesoamerican languages. This volume constitutes the first in-depth, systematic study of Headless Relative Clauses for any Mesoamerican languages we know of and the broadest and most articulated crosslinguistic study of headless relative clauses that has been conducted so far. For most of the languages in this volume, there is no descriptive or documentary material on wh-constructions in...