Functional sentence perspective and relatives

Contrary to the assumption often made in the literature as to relatives being informationally flat structures, this paper argues for the susceptibility of the re­strictive relative clause paradigm to Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) considerations of the type advanced especially in Firbas (1959,1964,1974,1979, 1992) and Svoboda (1981). The distribution of thematic and rhematic proper­ties in the relative clause H-noun - predicate complex for subject and object rel­atives on the basis of this susceptibility is demonstrated and its correlation with relative clause order facts, in both English and Greek, is discussed. It is, further, suggested that the specific correlation might be partly responsible for the com­plexity hierarchy obtained in data concerning the acquisition of the L2 English relative construction by Greek learners (Calfoglou 1998)