Skip to content
Free planNo credit card requiredStart writing
AI for Research home
AI for Research home
Dashboard
Sign inGet started

Search 250 million research papers

Read the abstract, see who wrote it and who cites it, and get the citation in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard.

About 973 papers for “Complementizer”

Why Isn’t this a Complementizer?

Richard S. Kayne · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014

One strand of this chapter addresses contrasts between that and this in complementizer-like contexts and elsewhere, in particular cases where that is possible but this is not. A second strand of the chapter argues that that is not a complementizer in relative clauses, but is rather a relative pronoun. Potential challenges to this assumption are addressed. A third strand considers sentential complements, arguing that they involve relative clauses as well, in which case the that which introduces them is also a relative pronoun, not a complementizer. This allows reducing the absence of sentential complementizer this to the absence of relative pronoun this.

Cited by 56

"Complementizer Agreement" in "Austropop"-Texten

Tesarek, Christian · University of Vienna · 2025

Zahlreiche Austropop-Hits – sowohl vergangener Tage als auch der jüngeren Vergangenheit – sind durch den Rückgriff auf den Dialekt geprägt. Die vorliegende Masterarbeit befasst sich daher mit der Variation eines dialektalen Phänomens, das insbesondere in den mittel- und südmittelbairischen Dialekten von großer Relevanz ist: Complementizer Agreement (CA). Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie sich die Variation zu diesem Phänomen in ausgewählten österreichischen Austropop-Texten im Zeitraum 1972–2022 gestaltet. Ziel ist es, anhand 80 untersuchter Songs von acht Künstler*innen(-gruppen) aus diesen beiden Dialektregionen einen Einblick in die Realisierung von CA zu geben. Hierfür wurden die Daten auf mehreren Ebenen analysiert. Die Ergebnisse zur intra- und interindividuellen Variation zeigen, dass CA bei allen ausgewählten Musiker*innen(-gruppen) eine bedeutsame Rolle spielt. Zudem lassen sich die bisherigen Befunde von Lenz et al. (2014), Fingerhuth & Lenz (2020) sowie Vergeiner & Bülow (2021) weitestgehend bestätigen: Die Untersuchung des Songtextkorpus legt nahe, dass CA in beiden Dialektregionen – konkret gesagt bei den Sänger*innen aus diesen Gebieten – häufig auftritt und mit Blick auf mögliche Sprachwandelprozesse stabil zu sein scheint. Allerdings zeigt die vorliegende Studie, dass das (Nicht-)Auftreten von CA in der Musik bzw. in Songtexten mit anderen Einflussfaktoren als in der alltäglichen Kommunikation zusammenhängen kann, weshalb diesem Aspekt ebenfalls nachgegangen wird.

Cited by 0Open access

Complementizer agreement is clitic doubling

Astrid van Alem · Natural Language & Linguistic Theory · 2024

Abstract Complementizer agreement in minority and nonstandard West Germanic languages is well-known and frequently studied, but there is little agreement on its analysis. In this paper, I add to this debate by presenting novel and underdiscussed data from Frisian and Limburgian on intervention effects: what happens to complementizer agreement when the complementizer and the subject are separated by an intervening element. In Frisian, intervention leads to ungrammaticality, and in Limburgian, it leads to the realization of complementizer agreement between the intervener and the subject. These effects cannot be accounted for by existing Agree and PF analyses of complementizer agreement. Instead, I argue that the complementizer agreement morpheme is a clitic. Adopting the approach to clitic doubling of van Craenenbroeck and van Koppen (2008), I develop an analysis of complementizer agreement as clitic doubling. The intervention effects in Frisian and Limburgian follow from an interplay of the structural size of the clitic and restrictions on movement. Specifically, the ungrammaticality of intervention in Frisian is the result of competition between the clitic and the intervener for the same structural position, and the subject-internal realization of complementizer agreement in Limburgian is the result of movement of the clitic below the intervener.

Cited by 3Open access

Complementizer Phrase in Central Kurdish

Omer Ahmad Azeez, Sabah Rashid Qadir · Qalaai Zanist Scientific Journal · 2023

Complementary phrase is a type of functional phrases that exist in Kurdish in several forms, such as question words and complex sentences. There are many assumptions and presentations, which has led to different opinions on this topic. This motivated the writing of this article. In English the complementary phrase in the form of the question word has a strong feature, because the question word in English moves overtly and goes to the position of the spec of the CP and the Aux verb is in the position of the head of CP, but in kurdish does not have a strong feature, because the question word in Kurdish does not move in overt syntax except in a few cases.  The head of the complementary phrase is in the form of null constitutent, because there is no auxiliary verb in Kurdish. In the form of complex sentences, complementary phrase in Kurdish appear in the case where the subordinating conjunction, or other words that form complex sentences, or those forms of words that precede the sentences. finally in this study we tried to compar the (WH) word movement in kurdish and English To explain the characteristics of this phrase in KurdishTherefore, we have chosen English because the theories and hypotheses are presented in that language.  

Cited by 0Open access

Epistemic verbs and zero complementizer

Kate Kearns · English Language and Linguistics · 2007

This article addresses the question of why certain epistemic verbs, particularly ( I ) think , have very high rates of zero complementizer in their clausal complements. I consider and reject the influential proposal from Thompson & Mulac (1991b) that the occurrence of zero complementizer in these contexts is associated with syntactic reanalysis of the epistemic verb and its subject to an adverbial-like epistemic phrase. Instead, I propose that zero complementizer signals a shift in the informational structure of the utterance, in which the embedded clause conveys the main assertion, but the syntactic structure of the sentence need not be altered. Further routinization is evident with I think but not with other epistemic verbs. Results from a study of newspaper prose are presented in support of the analysis.

Cited by 42

Clues from Dialect Syntax: Complementizer Agreement

Jan‐Wouter Zwart · VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften eBooks · 1993

It is common opinion among linguists, that languages and dialects cannot be distinguished in a principled way. Languages differ from each other with respect to certain syntactic phenomena, but so do dialects. Especially recent theoretical developments have provided the tools needed to describe these differences in an explanatory way. However, these tools will not serve to distinguish, say, Dutch dialects from the Dutch language. To be sure, we cannot exclude the possibility that one dialect of Dutch called Standard Dutch can be distinguished from all other dialects of Dutch by certain distinct linguistic criteria. However, this would be a matter of accidental taxonomy rather than one of methodological principle. More interesting is the possibility that a phenomenon present only in certain dialects of Dutch reveals properties shared by all dialects of Dutch, but not by any dialect of, say, English. Obviously, this calls for generalizations at an appropriate level of abstraction.

Cited by 48

Does Norwegian Have a FOR Complementizer?

André Hantson · Nordic Journal of Linguistics · 1983

Western, Jespersen and Vinje have called attention to the occurence in Norwegian of a for complementizer, which, like its English counterpart, introduces infinitive clauses with an overt subject. This paper attempts to find out whether the for that occurs in various types of sentences containing a for + NP + å infinitive sequence can really be analysed as a complementizer. The conclusion is that this Norwegian for is a squishy category: though most of the syntactic and semantic facts conflict with a complemtizer analysos, there is some interesting semantic and syntactic evidence (viz. a violation of the verb second constraint) that argues in favour of complementizer status.

Cited by 0

Phase-edge properties and complementizer omission

Irene Franco · Isogloss Open Journal of Romance Linguistics · 2015

This paper deals with the diachrony of complementizer omission (C-omission) in some Italian clauses. C-omission is restricted to clauses with [-realis] mood in Old as well as in Modern Italian, and to some types of declarative clauses in Modern Florentine (Cocchi & Poletto, 2005). This phenomenon is instead much more pervasive in the Renaissance period (Wanner 1981, Scorretti 1991) and invests basically all types of subordinate clauses. The present study concentrates on C-omission in Renaissance Italian relative clauses, which is attested in both subject and non-subject extractions. There is a subject/non-subject asymmetry in the frequency of C-omission in relative clauses, which is claimed to result from the combination of an active vs. inactive distinction that characterizes both Old and Renaissance Italian, and the loss of V-to-C. The active vs. inactive distinction is attributed to the presence of a strong (*) feature on the low-phase head, v*, in both Old and Renaissance Italian, while the loss of (*) in CP determines the loss of V-to-C in Renaissance Italian only. The argument is corroborated by further comparative facts from Old Occitan and Old French, as well as by a contrast with Old Portuguese and Old Spanish.

Cited by 4Open access

Grammatical and semantic elicitation: Complementizer agreement

Yegon, Kiplangat, Bossi, Madeline · California Digital Library · 2022

One .mp4 file and one .pdf file. Elicitation of complementizer agreement with and without saying semantics, in various contexts with different information sources, and in long-distance wh-questions.

Cited by 0Open access

On the Apparent Complementizer in Japanese

Saito, Hiroaki · ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2023

This paper investigates clausal complementation in Japanese, focusing on the particle tte. While tte appears to work as a complementizer, it shows distributional differences from the unmarked complementizer to. Based on the etymology of tte (it has developed from the combination of the speech verb iw ‘say’ and the complementizer to) and the cross-linguistic observation that grammaticalization of speech verbs is robustly found in languages with serial verb constructions, I suggest that tte involves a compound verb structure which consists of the speech verb iw ‘say’ and a verb of saying or thinking. The proposed analysis enables us to analyze tte as a cross-linguistically common pattern of grammaticalization; tte is in the process of the grammaticalization of a speech verb derived from serial/compound verb constructions.

Cited by 0