This thesis examines the syntactic structures of restrictive relativisation in English. English exhibits a variety of different relative constructions with different syntactic properties. We pursue the hypothesis that these properties are accounted for by the systematic variation in the structural size of English relatives.

We review the major competing analyses of relative clauses in the literature, with a particular focus on reconstruction effects, ultimately arguing in favour of the Matching Analysis (Chapter 2). The rest of the thesis is dedicated to the ‘size hypothesis’ and its application to finite, infinitival and reduced relatives in English, with cross-linguistic comparisons being made with Italian, Welsh, Malagasy and French where appropriate.

We show that there is systematic variation in the structural size of finite and infinitival clausal relatives, i.e. variation in the degree of articulation of their C-domains, and uncover a categorial distinctness effect in the English C-domain (Chapter 3). Differences in structural size combined with anti-locality are argued to provide a novel perspective on subject-object asymmetries in relative clauses and other related phenomena in English, with a close formal similarity between relativisation and topicalisation emerging as an important result (Chapter 4). We describe and analyse a novel construction involving control into infinitival relatives which offers independent yet complementary insights into the structure of the English C-domain (Chapter 5). We argue that systematic size variation also plays a key role in accounting for the properties of reduced relatives, including their restrictions on auxiliaries and participles, the interpretation of the present/progressive participle and the subject restriction, whilst evidence from high adverbs indicates close similarities between the clausal and clause-medial left peripheries (Chapter 6).

This thesis thus contributes a range of novel observations, generalisations and analyses with both empirical and theoretical implications for the nature of variation both within and across languages.