Hiwa Asadpour, Shene Hassan & Manfred Sailer presented a talk on “Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use” at the HPSG 2022 conference. They sketch an analysis of English and Sōrānī Kurdish non-wh relatives. In both languages, there is variation between bare relatives and relatives introduced by a function word, that and ka respectively. The authors discuss some aspects of social meaning that is attached to the choice between the bare and the non-bare variant. Building on previous work on social meaning in HPSG, Hiwa, Shene & Manfred model the socially conditioned variation as a combination of conventional implicatures and particularized conversational implicatures. The paper combines results of Shene’s dissertation on English and Kurdish relative clauses, Hiwa’s fieldwork on Kurdish varieties, and Manfred’s work on non-at-issue meaning in HPSG.
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