Timm (1988)

De Arbres
  • Timm, Lenora. 1988. 'Relative clause formation in Breton', Word, 39:79-107.


 Introduction:
 "1. Purpose. 
 Studies of Relative Clause (RC) formation in the Celtic languages are fairly sparse in comparison with work done on the other Indo-European languages. Recent published work has focused on Irish and Welsh (e.g., McCloskey 1979; Awberry 1977; Harlow 1981). Breton relativization has been investigated to a lesser degree, though there are a few significant studies by Breton linguists (Guyonvarc'h 1972-73; Denez 1973-74), and a more recent theoretical study by King 1982. As a VSO language, Breton should hold some of the same interest to language theorists as its more well-known sisters, with whom it shares important structural features of relativization, but from whom it also diverges in certain respects. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: 
 (1) to examine the properties of Breton relativization in the contemporary language, filling in some of the gaps of, or updating, the previous analyses; 
 (2) to offer some observations on King's claim (1982) that Breton RCs are internally headed. I shall be dealing chiefly with restrictive RCs in this paper, though there is a short section (6) on nonrestrictive clauses."