The Left Periphery of Slovenian Relative Clauses

This paper is concerned with the syntactic structure of relative clauses (RCs). It examines one particular facet of what Slovene data can contribute to the discussion, and at the same time provides an analysis of the left periphery in Slovene RCs. Section 2 outlines some key developments in the literature concerning the syntax of restrictive relative clauses, and traces a line of related approaches from Kayne (1994) and Bianchi (1999) to Aoun & Li (2003), arriving at an analysis that I adopt. In section 3 I then first show that the approach is compatible with and supported by data from Slovene before providing a more fine-grained analysis of the left periphery, namely ForceP>>IntP>>FocP, where ForceP is responsible for typing the clause and hosting the RC head in its specifier, the IntP layer is the target of wh movement establishing the relative dependency, while FocP is the locus of elements associated with focus.