crossingswhose

Crossingswhose is a term used in linguistic typology and corpus linguistics to describe a category of English relative clauses in which the head noun is a plural noun referring to multiple crossings, and the following relative clause attributes a property to that set of crossings. The label functions mainly as a methodological tag used by researchers and annotators rather than a basic surface grammatical category of English itself. It is employed to study how possessive relatives interact with plural head nouns and how long-distance dependencies are managed in real-world speech and text. The concept helps distinguish clauses like those crossing whose signals were malfunctioning from similar structures with other determiners.

Origin and usage

The term emerged in the early 2020s in corpus-based studies of relative clauses. It has been used primarily in descriptive grammars and annotation schemes to group instances where a possessive relative clause modifies a plural head noun denoting multiple locations or objects described as crossings.

Examples

The crossings whose signals were down during the storm were closed briefly.

The crossings whose lights were out for two hours disrupted traffic.

The crossings whose sidewalks were flooded were closed until repair crews arrived.

Semantics and variation

Crossingswhose typically marks a restrictive relative clause, pointing to a subset of crossings with a shared property. Some dialects tolerate alternative formulations with different determiners, while others rely on whose to express possession across the set.

See also

- Relative clause

- whose

- Long-distance dependency

- Corpus linguistics

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