In this thesis I have tried to gain insight into the syntax of relativization. As a
necessary background I have compiled data from several authors and provided a
systematic typology on most aspects of the relative construction. Several competing
syntactic theories have been defined and evaluated on the basis of possible
derivations of the syntactic main types of relatives and their word order variants, and
on the basis of many relevant properties of relative constructions, mainly concerning
the relation between the antecedent and the gap. I have concluded that the so-called
promotion theory is the most promising. It combines two independent ideas: i) the
relative clause is the complement of the external determiner, and ii) the head noun is
raised from within the relative clause. This theory provides the possibility of treating
all main types of relative constructions as syntactically closely related. I have argued
that all types of relatives involve roughly the same syntactic components. When
implemented within a derivational grammar, the differences can be traced back to
overt/covert distinctions, that is, differences in the syntactic feature checking
procedure. The features that are relevant in this respect are wh, Case, and φ-features.
Furthermore, there are differences in pied piping, which is accounted for in terms of
covert feature movement. Furthermore, I have investigated how the presence (and
absence) of various relative elements can be represented within this framework. On
the basis of the typological data mentioned above, a fine-grained classification of
relative elements has been presented.