Simple grammars, relative clauses and language change

Major Research Fellowship awarded by The Leverhulme Trust £189,332

The project starts from the question why Indo-European languages and their areal neighbours are so surprisingly more likely to have headed relative clauses built around interrogative pro-forms such as ‘who’, ‘whom’, ‘which’ etc. (Wh-words), than any other language family or area, and the project explores research questions in typology, semantics, and language contact. These kinds of relative clause have recurred independently in several Indo-European languages in processes of ‘parallel evolution’, but that finding leaves open the questions of why parallel evolution happens and why these forms are also found in unrelated neighbour languages.