In the present article, we describe what we call Intransparent-Gap Relatives (IGRs) in Japanese. In IGRs, a gap is located within the relative clause, and the head noun appears outside the relative clause. Unlike the standard head-external relatives, the gap in IGRs is not transparently associated with the head noun, but they are mediated through a metonymic relation. We propose a formal account of IGRs in terms of incremental parsing in Dynamic Syntax: an IGR string is processed in a left-to-right manner, and a semantic structure is progressively built up. This account unifies the standard head-external relatives and IGRs, relegating their differences to the ways in which the head noun is parsed and construed against the relative clause structure. Confirmation of this analysis comes from cross-constructional and cross-linguistic considerations. First, the analysis predicts that a metonymic reading is available in relatives but not in other rightward-displacement constructions, such as clefts and postposing. Second, the analysis suggests that IGRs are possible in languages such as Japanese and Korean, where the relative clause is processed before the head noun, but not in languages such as English and French, where the head noun is processed before the relative clause.

Typical headed relatives in English include a relative pronoun which takes the head as its antecedent. However, some modifying when-clauses in this language are peculiar relatives in that their heads are not the antecedent of when and they do not even have temporal referents. In view of the peculiarity of this type of relative clause, a novel account of the syntactic generation and interpretation of temporal when-clauses is pro- posed. Under this account four lexical entries of when, which have different semantic and syntactic properties, are recognized. The semantics of various whens are analyzed based on existing work, while the syntactic properties of different whens in non-interrogative sentences are characterized in the form of lexical information, which is implemented in the framework of Dynamic Syntax. The work in this article enriches the description of the diversity of relatives and suggests that the analysis of relatives can be unified semantically but not syntactically.

The clitic morpheme de in Mandarin Chinese has various uses. Typically, it is cliticized to a phrase whether the phrase is nominal or adjectival; it can also occur between two noun phrases when there is no relation of semantic modification. The constructions that involve the latter use of de, known as fake modification constructions, have been theoretically characterized many a time. In the existing characterizations, the morpheme is treated either as a mysteriously inserted lexical item, a modification marker, or a genitive morpheme. The existing accounts suffer from a variety of theoretical and empirical problems. Evidence is presented that in some other constructions and in fake modification constructions, de, while having no lexical semantic content of its own, occupies a position that is otherwise occupied by a two-place predicate. Based on this observation, a partially unitary theoretical account of fake modification constructions is formulated from a parsing perspective in the framework of Dynamic Syntax. In this account, four de-morphemes in fake modification constructions are recognized with different syntactic distributions; however, they all contribute a semantically underspecified predicate that is updated by syntactically constrained or context-based inference.

Finnish word order is relatively free, making room for all mathematically possible word orders in many constructions. Because there is no evidence in this language for radical nonconfigurationality, explanations must be sought from syntax. It is argued in this article that morphosyntax and word order represent syntactic structure at the PF-interface. Rich morphosyntax frees word order, poor morphosyntax freezes it. The hypothesis is formalized within the context of a parsing-oriented theory of the human language faculty (UG) combining left-to-right minimalism with the dynamic syntax approach. The analysis was implemented as an algorithm and successfully tested with a corpus of 119,800 unique Finnish word orders.