Internally-headed relative clauses in literary Somali?

After an overview of some features of grammatical variation across different Somali authors, the paper discusses several cases where a the head of a relative clause (RC) is preceded by an internal constiutuent of that RC, resulting in what looks like an internally-headed RC. This pattern also occurs when the head of the RC has the function of a complementizer for temporal and other kinds of subordinate clauses. In the corpus of prose texts that has been analysed only one constituent may occur before the head, whereas in poetry also instances of two constituents preceding the head have been observed.