1 Extraposition as Predicate Restriction: the case of Italian

Abstract. In this paper I show that the extraposition of restrictive relatives in Italian differs from English in that (i) extraposition is only possible when the relative head is indefinite, (ii) extraposition is impossible from the preverbal subject position. I propose an analysis of the Italian data based on the idea that the indefinite head and the extraposed relative are interpreted by the rule of Predicate Restriction proposed by Chung & Ladusaw (2005). The indefinite head fails to saturate the argument position that it occupies: this allows the extraposed relative to further restrict the same argument position, which is then bound by VP-level Existential Closure. Extraposition is impossible from preverbal subjects because in Italian, these fail to be reconstructed into VP, within the scope of Existential Closure. The comparison of English and Italian suggests that relative clause extraposition is not a unitary phenomenon at the cross-linguistic level