Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Shlonsky 2004). If one were to translate one of these internally-headed relatives into
English, the result is a kind of apposition as in “Susan, a present had been given to her by
her father,” but such a sentence in English sounds odd, even if does highlight the fact that
topicalization is often used to form such constructions: the referent of the relative
construction being introduced as topical noun and the head-internal relative following as
comment qualifying (in predicate-like fashion) the referent of the topicalized noun
phrase.
(35) [ Topic Susan] i [ Focus a present had been given to her i by her father]
Constructions like this are well-known from head-marking languages (cf. Nichols 1986)
and in topic-prominent languages such as Japanese and Korean, where a great deal of
research into head-internal relatives has taken place.
One of the most interesting and surprising features of head-internal relative
constructions (hereafter HIRC) is that there is a subtle and not entirely well-understood
interaction between the head-internal relative itself, which is necessarily indefinite, and
various markers of definiteness that can be attached “outside” the HIRC to indicate the
definiteness of the entire relative clause. On the basis of Williamson (1987), Lyons
(1999, 251) provides a nice example of the subtle dance of (in)definiteness in head-
internal relatives from Lakhota (note that I have neglected the retroflex diacritics in the
following example, see the referenced sources for the original transcription).
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