A typological study of prenominal relative clauses in the Americas

While relative clauses are well studied from a typological perspective, a systematic investigation of prenominal relative clauses (PreRCs) in the languages of the Americas has been notably absent in the literature. This article presents the first extensive typological survey of PreRCs across the Americas, establishing a set of cross-linguistic generalizations regarding their core structural features, including relativizers, relative verb morphology, gapping/resumption, and accessibility to relativization. Our results show that, despite some regionally specific and typologically rare variations, PreRCs in the Americas generally share the same typological properties documented in other previously studied languages. This finding provides strong evidence that the PreRC displays consistent typological patterns across genetically and areally diverse languages. The empirical data and generalizations presented here offer a solid foundation for refining universal syntactic theories of relativization.