Given a sentence such as :

Then the semantic information that I bought it yesterday accrues to the referent of the NP a dress. This information may be used to distinguish this dress from other dresses and to identify a particular dress.

In the same way, the concept designated by dress may explicitly be restricted to a subset of the elements that fall under it by specifying their participant function in the proposition designated by a clause like . Generally, an entity may be characterized by its participation in a particular situation. The principal way to achieve this is to form an open proposition. In the case at hand, the open proposition would be ‘I bought x yesterday’, where x indicates the open position. A grammatically transparent way of converting such an open proposition into a specifier is by means of a relative construction, as in .

The set of elements designated by is delimited by their role as patient x in the open proposition ‘I bought x yesterday’. This is why the semantic aspect of the operation in question is called ‘anchoring by participation’. The concept thus specified is called the nucleus of the relative construction.

The operation itself just restricts the nucleus. The result is a referential notion, not a referring expression.

The complex nominal dress I bought yesterday is used as the lexical core of a referring expression in . In the speech situation presupposed, there is one object forming the extension of the concept, so reference to it may succeed by simply using the complex concept. The same complex nominal is used as a predicate in . The operation of anchoring by participation here does not serve reference, and there is actually no specific information about the extension of the concept thus formed. Consequently, anchoring by participation is not simply a sub-operation of reference.

On the other hand, the operation of anchoring by participation differs from the other subspecies of concept anchoring by its power. The operations of concept characterization are essentially limited in their scope by the modifiers available from the lexicon. anchoring by participation puts at the speaker's disposal the entire set of possibilities that the grammar offers at the clause level. It thus allows the speaker to pin down the extension of the nucleus as narrowly as needed by availing himself of some particular situation in which the referent designated by the concept participates and by specifying all the ingredients of this situation as precisely as may be needed to identify the one entity in the world which has that particular role in that particular situation. Thus, anchoring by participation does play an important role in the identification of referents.

Important semantic variants of this construction of anchoring of a concept by a proposition include

• the opposition between restrictive and appositive relative clause
• the specification of a semantically empty base
• the indifferent relative.

As usual, the onomasiological perspective does not identify the same set of constructions identified by the semasiological perspective. Thus, anchoring by participation does not equal relative clause formation.

a) On the one hand, certain constructions allow anchoring by participation without involving relative constructions.

One pole of the continuum of what counts as a relative construction is occupied by complex sentences with an adjoined rather than embedded relative clause. While this construction counts as a less-than-prototypical relative construction, the construction in is beyond that pole. It affords anchoring by participation without being a relative construction.

The other pole of the continuum is occupied by complex nominals with a non-finite attribute, traditionally called relative participle. If this allows at least a minimum of variation of the syntactic function of the nucleus inside the verbal construction – as does the Turkish relative participial discussed in , the complex nominal counts as a marginal instance of a relative construction. This condition is, however, not fulfilled by . Consequently, although one may suppose that the dress participates in the process of shining, is not a relative construction.

b) On the other hand, there are complex nominals which display the formal properties of a relative construction without fulfilling the latter's function.

shows a relative clause functioning as the extrafocal clause in a cleft-sentence. The function here is not the formation of a concept of ‘what can be done’, but rather putting the interrogative pronoun into emphatic focus position.

In the function is not to specify the core meaning of Jean by the condition that he speaks, but instead to form a sentential complement to a verb of perception (verbum sentiendi). Thus, this construction, again, remains outside the functional domain of anchoring by participation.