Abstract

From a diachronical point of view, there contact clauses are not derived by way of deleting subject relative pronouns of the relative clause constructions. But, rather, they are obtained, based on the apo koinou principle, by reducing the parataxis structure, i.e., two adjacent sentences, into one sentence. And these there contact clauses constitute part of the derivation of the relative structures.
The basic assumption is that the relative structure is derived from the parataxis structure. And our new hypothesis is that the derivation is a two-way process: one way is from the parataxis, via pronominalization and conjunction insertion, to the relative structure; the other is from the parataxis, via there contact clause, to the relative structure. It is shown that this hypothesis accommodates all the data gathered from nursery rhymes.
It is furthermore claimed that, in the transition from there contact clause to the relative structure in the above mentioned two-way process, emergence of the relative pronoun is motivated by a principle in Grammatical Dynamism which fills the gap in the syntactic paradigm, a step motivated by the existing process of relativization in the other route of this hypothesis.