Nat Lang Linguist Theory DOI 10.1007/s11049-016-9333-0 The semantics, syntax, and morphology of Transparent Free Relatives revisited; a comparison of two approaches Alex Grosu 1 Received: 30 January 2015 / Accepted: 20 November 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Abstract This article proposes to go beyond the earlier literature on Transparent Free Relatives (TFRs) by pursuing three interrelated goals: (i) To provide a sharper descriptive and analytical characterization of the semantic and pragmatic distinctions between TFRs on the one hand and Free Relatives (FRs) with a comparable internal configurational structure on the other. (ii) To provide for a number of representative sub-kinds of TFRs a compositional semantics substantially more detailed and precise than has previously been offered (in particular, in Grosu 2003, section 6). (iii) To carry out a comprehensive comparison of two views of the configurational structure of TFRs, by examining the extent to which each of them can deal with the syntactic, morphological, semantic and pragmatic properties of TFRs. Keywords T(ransparent) F(ree) R(elatives) · The FR-TFR distinction · Individual concepts · Counterparts/guises 1 Introduction Free relatives (FRs), illustrated by English data like those in (1) and (2), have been the object of a considerable amount of attention in the theoretically-oriented liter- ature of the last half-century or so. A partial list of pertinent references that ad- dressed their configurational syntax and the morphology of their left periphery is: Bresnan and Grimshaw (1978), Groos and van Riemsdijk (1981), Harbert (1983), Suñer (1984), Larson (1987, 1998), Grosu (2003, Part 1), and van Riemsdijk (1998, 2006b), all of which addressed primarily the syntactic and morphological properties B A. Grosu grosua@post.tau.ac.il 1 Department of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Webb Building 407, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel