Wh-relative clauses in English and their Spanish and German equivalents. A preliminary study

Abstract

In this study I will investigate wh-relatives in English, Spanish and German, paying particular attention to the prepositional type, which has so far been relatively underexplored. Taking English wh-relatives as tertium comparationis (Kidd, 2011) and using a corpus-based methodology, this paper will describe whatever parallelisms and divergences emerge when comparing these constructions with their equivalents in Spanish (Bosque et al., 1999: 395-522; Mackenzie and Martínez Caro, 2012) and German (Lehmann, 1984; Krenn & Volk, 1993). Part 1 presents an overview of wh-relative clauses in English, Spanish and German, offering a revision of the relevant theoretical notions. Part 2, on the other hand, offers an empirical analysis based on the tokens of wh-relative clauses found in my corpus. Chapter 3 provides a description of the corpus on which this investigation is based: the Simon Fraser University review corpus (SFURC)