Circassian relatives

Abstract This paper documents relative clause constructions in the polysynthetic Circassian languages of the West Caucasian family and attempts to establish diachronic links between them. It is shown that the Circassian languages possess both externally-headed and internally-headed relative clauses, with the latter having semantic heads that are interpreted outside of the relative clause. In addition, these languages have constructions which cannot be unequivocally assigned to one type or the other, and have properties of both. This paper suggests that there is a diachronic explanation for this, but also argues that the contrast between externally-headed and internally-headed relative clauses is not as clear-cut as is usually assumed in the typological literature.