@inproceedings{czerniak-das-2025-syntax,
    title = "Syntax of referents of relative markers: Evidence from a corpus of learner {E}nglish",
    author = "Czerniak, Izabela  and
      Das, Debopam",
    editor = {Jablotschkin, Sarah  and
      K{\"u}bler, Sandra  and
      Zinsmeister, Heike},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 23rd International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.tlt-1.12/",
    pages = "97--110",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-291-6",
    abstract = "We investigate the referents of relative markers of English relative clauses, focusing on their syntactic role in the matrix clauses. The referents, unlike relative markers and related features, have compratively remained understudied. We examine the syntactic environments of the referents as part of a larger project, which develops the ICLE-RC, a corpus of learner English texts annotated for relative clauses and related phenomena (it-/pseudo-clefts, existential-relatives, etc.). The corpus derives from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al., 2020), and contains 144 academic essays, representing six L1 backgrounds {--} Finnish, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu. We annotate those texts for over 900 relative clauses (and over 400 related phenomena), with respect to a wide array of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse features. Results from our analysis show that the relativisation of referents varies according to their syntactic functions. The referents are also observed to interact with other RC-features, yielding systematic variations across different L1 backgrounds, (some of) which can potentially be attributed to the typological properties of the associated L1."
}