Identification of Relative Clause as a Nominal Dependency Relation

This paper proposes to look at the Relative Clause construction in Vietnamese with respect to its status as an adjunct (the dominant view of Chomsky (1971)) as well as a complement, a recent view put forth in Kayne (1994). In addition, we propose to provide a simpler solution for RC recognition which overcomes the need to identify first an RC structure as either a complement or and adjunct. In effect, the paper bypasses the need to feature specification on either the adjunct or the head by showing that there is in fact no adjunct generated in the construction of a RC.