Rethinking relatives

This chapter is concerned with the syntactic size of finite and infinitival relative
clauses in English. I claim that these fall into three (or even four) distinct
structural sizes. Assuming a cartographic descriptive framework, I provide evidence
for this claim from novel observations concerning the (un)availability of adverbial
and argument fronting in the different types of relative clause (following
Haegeman 2012). Specifically, some relative clauses permit both adverbial and argument
fronting, some permit adverbial fronting only, whilst others do not permit
fronting at all. Additional support for my claim comes from three instances of categorial
distinctness effect (in the sense of Richards 2010), which I argue instantiate a
distinctness effect between elements in SpecTopP and SpecFocP.