Maria Kholodilova (Institute for Linguistic Studies, HSE University) Locative relativization in Slavic languages and beyond

In most European languages, locative relativization involves competition between at least two relativization strategies, roughly corresponding to English house in which I live vs. house where I live. The former strategy is more explicit, as it specifies the spatial relation, while the latter neutralizes at least the distinction between ‘in’ and ‘on’. Based on my current sample of 12 Slavic and 8 non-Slavic European languages, I will discuss the corpus distribution of these strategies with particular attention to the impact of head noun semantics. I propose that there is a consistent tendency toward greater explicitness of marking along the following hierarchy of head nouns: ‘place’ < ‘house’ < ‘book’, i.e., the marking is more explicit with the nouns that are less likely to appear in locative expressions. These findings align with a broad range of phenomena showing more explicit marking in less frequent configurations — both in relative clauses (Keenan, Comrie 1977; Fox, Thompson 2007; Cristofaro, Ramat 2007) and in non-relative locative expressions (Stolz & al. 2014; Haspelmath 2019).