N-final relative clauses: The Amharic case

Kayne develops a unique analysis for the relative clause construction based on the Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA). According to Kayne (1994) outside the relative CP relative clauses do not have a nominal head. For him, the determiner directly selects the relative CP. Brosely (1997) and Platzack (1997/200) argue that this kind of analysis has many drawbacks. However, their arguments come from N-initial relative clause constructions. This paper examines how Kayne's approach handles N-final relative clause constructions. We will immediately note that Kayne (1994) proposes the empirically erroneous generalisation that N-final relative clauses lack an overt complementizer. Contrary to Kayne, languages such as Amharic clearly have a complementizer. This paper argues that from an empirical and theoretical point of view Kayne's proposal to N-final relative clause construction has a lot of problems. In line with Platzack (1997/2000), this paper argues that N-final relative clauses can be treated uniformly with N-initial relative clauses as a complement of a 'head' nouns and moved to the functional definiteness Agr category to check the definiteness feature in the sense of Chomsky (1993).