Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use

Abstract

The paper looks at constraints on non-wh relatives in Sorani Kurdish (Iranian) and English (Germanic). We argue that some of them are grammatical, whereas others introduce social meaning. We present a basic, lexicalist syntactic analysis and expand it with social meaning constraints. We propose that classical sociolinguistic variables have the status of conventional implicatures and the overall assessment of a style is treated as a particularized conversational implicature.