On the question of subordination or coordination in V2-relatives in German

In recent years, relative clauses with Verb Second (V2) have received a lot of attention. This is due to their peculiar syntactic and semantic properties. On the one hand, the content of the relative clause is asserted, indicating – given certain theoretical assumptions further addressed below – its non-subordinated status, on the other hand, they allow for a restrictive interpretation, indicating its subordinated status, since the restrictive reading under standard assumptions requires that the relative clause is interpreted within the DP heading it. Moreover, V2 has been argued to be a root phenomenon and clauses containing V2 should thus display root-like properties. One important property of root clauses is that they – contrary to regular embedded clauses – can represent different types of speech acts: assertions, questions, commands and so on. It thus comes as little surprise that the best analysis of V2- relatives on the market, namely that by Gärtner (2001, 2002), posits an analysis in which two (main) clauses are coordinated, explaining the presence of V2 in the relative clause and relating it to the proto-assertional force of the relative. This syntactic analysis renders the semantic interpretation of V2-relatives a rather complex issue, since the content of the relative clause must be integrated into the interpretation of the DP heading it during the computation of the matrix clause to derive the correct restrictive interpretation. We propose an alternative account that assumes that V2-relatives are regular subordinated relative clauses that due to the specific property of embedded V2 need to be extraposed and are interpreted in a high-adjoined position in the matrix clause. The restrictive interpretation of the relative clause will be argued to be derived from a matching analysis of relative clauses in which (weak) quantifiers contained in the head NP are interpreted in the embedded clause whose interpretational properties follow from the information structural properties of the main clause and the specific contribution of V2 in the relative clause.