SEMANTIC AND GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES OF RELATIVE CLAUSE MORPHOLOGY IN THE LANGUAGES OF NEPAL CAROL GENETTI University of California, Santa Barbara 0. Introduction The country of Nepal contains at least several dozens of languages lit- tle known to the world at large. 1 Of these, perhaps a dozen have been at least partially described, but many remain with no description whatsoever. Most of the languages in Nepal are of the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. There are several Indo-Aryan languages as well, most notably Nepali, the country's official language. One typological characteristic which most, if not all of these languages share, is a tendency for multiple embeddings of clauses within a sentence. Clause chains, embedded direct and indirect quotations, and complement, adverbial subordinate, and relative clauses are all used in great abundance, often resulting in long sentences of intricate structure. The focus of this study is on the relative clause in these languages, in particular, on the range of semantic and grammatical categories which are reflected by the relative clause morphology. Most of the work on the typology of relative clauses has been con- cerned with three separate aspects of relativization. One concerns the struc- tural regularities of relative clauses cross-linguistically (Kuno 1974; Lehmann 1984, Givón 1990). The syntactic ordering of relative clauses with respect to the head noun, and strategies used to indicate the role of the argument coreferential with the head noun in the relative clause are gener- ally the focus of studies of this type. The second aspect of relativization which has been discussed is that of the accessibility of various types of noun Studies in Language 16:2 (1992), 405-427. DOI 10.1075/sl.l6.2.07gen ISSN 0378-4177 / E-ISSN 1569-9978 © John Benjamins Publishing Company