"The boy kicked the ball kicked him"

Let's start with a diagram of two sentences that have a co-referential noun phrase:

We can create a complex sentence with the restrictive relative clause algorithm:

  1. get 2 sentences with co-referential NPs. One is the "main" clause, the other is the "subordinate" clause.

    The man ate the pie. (main S)
    The pie was served to him.

  2. attach a relative pronoun to the coreferential NP in the relative clause - substitute a pronoun for the noun, that for the pie.

    The man ate the pie. (main S)
    that was served to him.

  3. move this NP to the front of the relative clause. In this example, it is already at the front of the relative clause.

    The man ate the pie. (main S)
    that was served to him.

  4. embed the string headed by the relative pronoun immediately after the head N in the main S.

    The man ate the pie ~ that was served to him.

  5. in certain situations you may optionally delete the relative pronoun and also the auxilliary verb and preposition:

    The man ate the pie served him.

Similarly, we can reverse this process for the sentence The boy kicked the ball kicked him

  1. Replace the relative pronoun, auxilliary verb and preposition:

    The boy kicked the ball that was kicked to him

  2. find the embedded string headed by the relative pronoun immediately after the head N in the main S.

    The boy kicked the ball ~ that was kicked to him.

  3. separate these into two sentences

    The boy kicked the ball. (main S)
    that was kicked to him.

  4. we recognize that the NP is already at the front of the relative clause.

    The boy kicked the ball. (main S)
    that was kicked to him.

  5. replace the pronoun with the coreferential NP - the ball for that.

    The boy kicked the ball. (main S)
    The ball was kicked to him.

So, the full sense of the sentence, "The boy kicked the ball kicked him." comes from understanding the two related sentences: "The boy kicked the ball." and "The ball was kicked to him." Paraphrasing, "The boy kicked the ball that someone else had kicked to him."

What is the difficulty in understanding this sentence? It isn't clear, although it may have something to do with a repeated verb (as well as a repeated NP), since people report no difficulty in understanding the sentence, "The boy kicked the ball thrown him." Certainly, not removing the optional relative pronoun, auxilliary verb and preposition makes the construction quite understandable. Those missing elements, which must have traces in some underlying structure, along with the double duplication of NP and V makes resolving the traces difficult, more so than in the case of the first example with different verbs.

OR

We can reverse the two sentences!

  1. The boy kicked the ball.
    The boy kicked him. (main S)

  2. the coreferential NP is the boy which we replace with that

    that kicked the ball.
    The boy kicked him.

  3. the relative pronoun is already at the front, so moving on to the next step, we embed the relative pronoun immediately after the head N in the main S.

    The boy ~that kicked the ball kicked him

  4. and dropping the relative pronoun,

    The boy kicked the ball kicked him

The difference between the two versions goes back to the referent of the pronoun him. If the pronoun is matched to the closest antecedent noun phrase, then the first interpretation is implied. If you believe that the pronoun refers to a third party, then the second interpretation is implied. Context is everything!

OR

The two base sentences in the relative clause construction might have been

The boy kicked the ball. (main S)
The ball was kicked by him.

yielding the sentence

The boy kicked the ball ~that was kicked by him.

and then reduced, as in the first example, to

The boy kicked the ball kicked him.

This doesn't work, however. If we can look towards case grammar for an explanation, there are two agents here. The difference between this and the first example at the top of this page is that "kicked" has a transitive sense so that "to him" works and as a direct object we can drop the "to" and have no difficulty in restoring it when the sentence is parsed. The preposition "by" here has an underlying semantic interpretation of an agent not an object, and there has already been an agent named in the earlier part of the sentence so you would try to find a means of using the "him" to satisfy some other case. So while one could follow this relative clause formation and find yourself here, you would have a sentence with redundant actors, which you would reject.

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Comments to author: David Bozak
All contents copyright © 2000, SUNY Oswego, All rights reserved.
Revised: February 19, 2001
URL: http://www.cs.oswego.edu/~dab/310/kicked.html