English Restrictive Relative Clauses Are Subject to Crossover Violations

Abstract The literature on crossover effects has yet to arrive at a consensus on the status of weak crossover (WCO) in restrictive relative clauses (RRCs). We present the first experimental investigation of this construction, finding clear evidence for the presence of WCO effects in English RRCs, contra claims in the theoretical literature (e.g., Chomsky 1982, Reinhart 1997, Rouveret 2002). In our large-scale acceptability judgment task, participants consistently rated WCO-inducing constructions lower than their non-WCO counterparts. Our results also show similarly strong crossover effects for both referential and quantificational antecedents, a finding that aligns more closely with a head-external analysis of relative clauses rather than a head-raising analysis. While our results do not adjudicate among the many analyses of crossover effects in the literature, they confirm the presence of WCO in English RRCs, thereby refuting the empirical claim that English RRCs do not exhibit this effect whatsoever. Accordingly, our findings can be used to argue against analyses of WCO that predict its absence in RRCs. This work also sets the stage for cross-linguistic investigations of WCO, extending our paradigm to other, lesser-studied languages.