Dr. Tim Thornes, professor of linguistics, contributed a chapter to the newly published two-volume work ‘The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America.’ The chapter, titled ‘Clause Combining: Relative Clauses,’ surveys the grammar of relative clauses—a complex syntactic phenomenon—in a representative sample of indigenous languages and language families of North America. In it, he explores the traditional parameters of variation defined for well-studied ‘standard average European’ languages to assess the extent to which they apply in this unique and richly diverse linguistic landscape.
