Reconstruction Effects in English and Romanian Restrictive Relative Clauses The Case of Idioms
Reconstruction Effects in English and Romanian Restrictive Relative Clauses The Case of Idioms

Summary/Abstract: This article is aimed at describing relevant reconstruction facts regarding the interpretation of idioms that have been used to argue in favour or against the proposed analyses of relative clauses. The article is organised as follows. In section 2, we briefly discuss the analyses of relative clauses: head raising/complementation (HRA) or matching/adjunction (MA). Then, we bring into discussion the reconstruction of idioms in section 3. The interpretation of idioms is a case that provides clear evidence for the HRA: for the idiom (or the collocation) to be properly interpreted, the head noun of the relative clause has to be reconstructed into the relative clause to form a unit with the verb. Nonetheless, idiom reconstruction can also be dealt with by MA if we adopt Citko’s (2001) deletion under identity approach. In section 4, we discuss the contexts that involve idioms in which the external heads of relatives must not be reconstructed or must be interpreted in more than one position. The last section concludes our discussion about the reconstruction effects with regard to idioms in English and Romanian RRCs.

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