Leading Question, Hypothesis, and Proposal

In this chapter we introduce a proposal from the linguistic theory of relatives, one which minimally underlies all forms of relative clause formation (Kayne 1994 and subsequent work). We adopt a theoretical paradigm which moves from the study of specific relative clause structures to general principles of relativization which underlie all relatives all typological variants. We formulate the leading hypothesis that headless relativization is a developmental primitive in terms of this paradigm. This representation of Universal Grammar (UG) offers a template which relates Determiner Phrases and Complementizer Phrases, which in turn allows the acquisition of relative clause in specific language grammars.