Erlatibizazio-estrategiak euskarazbegirada historiari

Abstract

This paper deals with Basque relativisation strategies: the prenominal and postnominal gapped relatives, appositive relatives, relatives with the prefix bait-, and pronominal zein ‘which’ relative clauses. The study is based on a corpus consisting of 16th to 19th centuries texts. The first goal is to analyse the competition between the constructions and describe the changes in frequency. The analysis of the corpus shows that the range of constructions appearing in texts starts to narrow since the second half of the 18th century, and that the prenominal construction eventually prevailed. The second goal is to compare the role and functions which each construction has or has had in the whole system. To that end, the following features are analysed: the range of arguments that can be relativised in each construction, the length of the subordinate clause, the impact of animacy on the choice of structure, and the function of the relative clause and the position of the subordinate clause in the main clause. The results show that, in general, construction which place the relative right to the head were employed mainly in special or marked contexts (e.g. to relativise arguments not possible in the prenominal construction or when the subordinate clause was especially long).