A referent grammatical analysis of relative clauses

Relative clauses have traditionally been said to have an antecedent or a correlate corresponding to a coreferent, missing, and relativized constituent in the relative clause (some representative works on relative clauses are mentioned in the list of references). Referent grammar (Sigurd, 1987) assumes referent variables in the syntactic representations of noun phrases and it is natural to assume that it is a referent variable, which is the antecedent or the correlate, not an individual word or individual words. The advantages of this analysis will be shown in this paper. The paper includes a survey of the main types of relative clauses with some typological comments. Swedish and English will be used as the main languages of demonstration. As Referent Grammar (RG) is formalized in Definite Clause Grammar (DCG), a formalism supported by many Prolog programs, the analysis can be implemented directly and run on a computer. The analysis presented in this paper is part of a computer program used for automatic translation by SWETRA (Swedish Computer Translation Research Center at the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, SWEDEN).