Expanding relative clauses: Semantics, syntax, communicative organization

The paper discusses semantic, syntactic, and communicative features of expanding (relative) constructions, which are usually qualified as correlative with complement sentences (“inversely subordinate”), cf.: On uehal, o čem ja ne znal lit. ‘He left, of which I did not know’ — Ja ne znal o tom, čto on uehal ‘I did not know he left’. The cases are considered in which the denotative status of the situation expressed in the main part and the propositional relative pronoun do not coincide: Menja pereveli v otdel gazet, o čem ja prosil Il’ičeva lit. ‘I was transferred to the newspaper department, which I asked Ilychev about’ (‘transferred’ — real status, ‘asked to be transferred to the newspaper department’ — unreal status). A comparison is made with the denotative statuses of subject noun phrases and anaphoric pronouns. It is shown that expanding constructions serve as the implementation of one of the narrative strategies, which brings events (facts) to the forefront and gives the status of an additional message to modal predicates.