Figure 1

Syntactic structures of Kazakh sentences with a relative clause. We presented Kazakh sentences in one of four construct conditions: OS, OO, SO, and SS, which are shown here in a two-by-two format. In the relative clause (a bracket [ ] for each sentence example in Table 1), the gap is indicated by an empty category (e), which is not pronounced but corresponds to a head (adamdï or adam in these examples) in the main clause. The noun adamdï (in blue) is the accusative form of “man,” and adam (in orange) is in the nominative case. For each panel, a binary-branching tree structure is shown, and each red bending arrow indicates the syntactic relationship between the head and gap. For example, the “Object-Subject (OS)” construction represents the object at the head position (the start of an arrow), and the subject at the gap position (the end of an arrow). In each sentence, the same indices are attached to the corresponding subject/noun or pronoun (N) and predicate/verb (V), where the indices 1 and 2 denote the main and relative clauses, respectively. An N (shown in gray) without an index is always an object. Bidirectional arrows below the nouns and verbs denote subject-verb (SV) pairs.