Cyclic attraction into networks of coreference

Abstract

In many languages, focus constructions and constructions involving restrictive relative clauses show striking formal similarities, a fact which suggests that there is some deep, non-language-specific relationship between the constructions. The most tenable hypothesis about the nature of this relationship seems to be that both constructions involve the promotion of material from an embedded into a matrix sentence, a syntactic process that may be correlated with the semantic process of foregrounding one part of a sentence at the expense of the rest.