Masayoshi Shibatani, of Rice University, will deliver this talk as part of the Japanese Speaker Series.

While there are obvious formal similarities between nominalizations and so-called relative clauses, as in Japanese, Lahu (Matisoff 1972), Quechua (Weber 1983), and many other languages, the relationship between the two either has not been pursued to its full extent or has been pursued in a wrongheaded way. For example, the connection between relative clauses and the so-called free relatives in European languages deserves further investigation. Popular typological characterizations of different types of nominalization as 'headless relatives' and 'internally-headed relatives' point to the second problem. This presentation, starting with Japanese data, attempts to accord various types of nominalization their proper positions in grammar and examines the roles they play both as referring expressions and modifiers of nominal heads. The proposed nominalization-based analysis of the standard RC construction raises serious challenges to the assumptions made in both generative and typological studies of relative clauses. In particular, it is claimed (1) that relative clauses are in fact not clauses, let alone sentences, at all; hence (2) that the basic definitions of RCs by the leading researchers in the field are wrong, and (3) that Keenan and Comrie's (1977) NP Accessibility Hierarchy is not relevant to relativization per se.