Patterns of relative clause formation tend to vary according to the typological properties of a language. Highly polysynthetic languages tend to have fully nominalized relative clauses and no relative pronouns, while other typologically diverse languages tend to have relative clauses which are similar to main or independent clauses. Languages of the Americas, with their rich genetic diversity, have all been under the influence of European languages, whether Spanish, English or Portuguese, a situation that may be expected to have influenced their grammatical patterns. The present volume...

This volume addresses the relation between finiteness and nominalization, which is far more complex than the simple opposition finite-nonfinite. The contributions analyze finiteness cross-linguistically from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, focusing on a number of topics that has not been thoroughly explored in the literature. First, the correlation between finiteness and nominalization is also affected by a third factor, information structure. Second, there is a correlation between the continuum of finiteness and the scale from main/independent clauses to dependent clauses. Given...