Displaced sentential complements to nouns in German

This article makes the novel observation that in German, CPs functioning as complements to nouns can appear to the left of their associated DP-internal gap position. It surveys the phenomenon and, based on a number of diagnostics, argues that the noun complement clause exhibits properties as if its surface position is movement-derived. Based on parallel observations in PP-extraction from DP, I show that the same constraints on movement apply modulo construction-specific properties of DPs with a noun complement clause. The findings buttress previous approaches to extraction from DPs that highlight differentiating and controlling lexical factors. Given the delicacy of the judgments involved in this phenomenon, the article is mostly devoted to laying out its descriptive properties. Tentative suggestions as to an analysis are offered in the end.

An experimental reassessment of complex NP islands with NP-scrambling in Japanese

There is little consensus in the Japanese syntax literature on the question of whether complex NPs with a complement clause headed by to yuu ‘that say’ are islands for NP-scrambling dependencies. To explore this question, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments using the factorial definition of islands to test the island status of noun complements, relative clauses (which are complex NPs, but uniformly considered islands in the literature), and coordinated NP structures (which are also uniformly considered islands in the literature). Our first experiment yielded clear evidence that relative clauses and coordinated NPs are islands, and that noun complements are not. Our second experiment replicated the relative clause and coordinated NP results, but yielded an inconclusive null result for noun complements. Taken together, our results suggest either that noun complements are not islands, or that noun complements yield a small island effect that cannot be reliably detected at the typical sample sizes of 30-40 participants used here. We also investigated between- and within-participant variability in our results. We observe no evidence of increased between-participant variability for noun complements relative to other islands, and no increase of within-participant variability for noun complements relative to grammatical NP-scrambling, thus corroborating our conclusions. Our results have consequences for a number of issues that have been encoded in current syntactic theories of island effects, including the correlation between syntactic constituent complexity and island status (e.g., number of bounding nodes or phase heads), and the correlation between complementizer deletion and island status (e.g., the complement/adjunct distinction).

Negation as a predictor of clausal complement choice in World Englishes

Research on complementizer selection has shown that the presence of a negative particle in a subordinate complement clause influences complement choice, leading to a relatively higher proportion of finite complementation patterns by increasing the complexity of the syntactic environment. Studies have also shown that different types of negation, namely not- and no-negation, increase the tendency towards more explicit complementation options (Rohdenburg 2015). The current study focuses on the effect of not- and no-negation on the complementation profile of the verb regret, which allows variation between finite that/zero-complement clauses and nonfinite (S) -ing clauses. The GloWbE corpus was used to create a data set of more than 4,000 examples from 16 varieties of English. The results of the analysis support previous findings that the presence of a negative marker in the complement clause increases the preference for finite patterns, especially in L2 varieties of English. However, contrary to the expectations of this study, no-negation was found to have a stronger effect on complement choice than not-negation.

How Many Moods Are There in Polish? The Case of the Polish Subjunctive

The present paper is concerned with the Polish construction introduced with the subordinating complementizer żeby. The construction is interesting for its mood properties, which have been subject of a long-standing debate in Polish linguistics. The paper explores the semantic range of the construction and illuminates its mood properties. More specifically, it argues that żeby clauses represent a subjunctive mood and as such should be distinguished from indicative and conditional constructions. This distinction is described in terms of Langacker’s model of control and Givón’s theory of semantic binding. It is argued that the żeby construction constitutes an intermediate category between indicative mood, which grants the speaker a high degree of control over a proposition described in the complement clause, on the one hand, and conditional mood, which situates a proposition outside the conceptualizer’s dominion of control, on the other. The paper also highlights the iconic and metonymic motivation behind the distribution of żeby clauses in present-day Polish.

Against complementizers

In this paper we investigate the syntax of complement clauses in some Romance and Germanic languages by focusing on word order asymmetries and extraction phenomena. We argue that complement clauses are relative clauses, as proposed in Manzini & Savoia (2003, 2011) and Kayne (2010). However, differently from the previous proposals, we claim that as in relative clauses (see Poletto & Sanfelici 2018a), the ‘complementizer’ partially spells out either the nominal element internal to the relative/complement clause, resulting thus into a raising derivation of the relative/complement clause, or the external nominal modified by the relative/complement clause itself, leading to a matching derivation. This difference in the raising vs. matching derivation accounts for a series of well-known asymmetries between some Romance and Germanic languages. In addition, we show that this proposal may be suitable to derive the different extraction patterns exhibited in ‘traditional’ relative clauses and complement clauses.

Dynamic presupposition of want and polarity sensitivity

In this paper, I argue that content of some presuppositions is determined dynamically. In particular, it is shown that the presupposition of want in control constructions depends on the interpretation of an action in the complement clause. Different presuppositional content of sentences with want is argued for using new and known observations about licensing of Polarity Sensitive Items. I propose to capture the dynamic nature of the presupposition of want using the AGM paradigm for belief revision (Alchourrán, Gärdenfors & Makinson 1985). Finally, I show that sensitivity to the interpretation of an action as intentional versus accidental is not specific to polarity system, but can be found across different domains of the grammar in many unrelated languages.

Linguocultural Analysis of Politicians’ Speeches Based on Speeches in German

Political discourse forms the attitude of people towards values, ideals and norms. Three important political features were analyzed. German political speeches update modern concepts of German linguoculture: responsibility, order, solidness, discipline, security. The study of texts of political speeches gives an idea of the linguocultural situation. The value of order lies in reliability, security, predictability of the future, and clear rules. Safety is defined as a sense of security, a lack of internal confusion, an idea of what needs to be done. The basis in the German sphere of concepts is the careful preparation for any activity, the elaboration and thought-out of all its details, the recording and detail of information, the systematicity and sequence of actions, the quality of the product of the activity. Lexical and grammatical features of political speeches are considered, which are used to effectively influence the interviewer and audience: use of modal schemes, passive voice, complement clause, «we»/«ours» pronouns. The main themes of political speech are economic growth, the need to unite to fight for a great future, the prevention of wars, peacekeeping.

A Study of Direct Speech Complementation with Embedding Verbs: Collostructional Analysis

Non-relational verbs, as opposed to relational ones, cannot replace their complement clause with a complex nominal, meaning that they do not denote a proposition, as the Relational Analysis states. However, direct speech seems to be a proper replacement for the complement clause in the non-relational verb cases. This paper deals with the analysis of some of the most representative taxonomies of embedding verbs using the British National Corpus, to check whether they can occur with direct speech complements; the collostructional analysis, which is a technique of statistical significance; and the programming language R to do it in a computational and automatic way. Thus, the collostructional method will measure the strength between the embedding verbs and their corresponding complement clauses in the direct speech form.

Systemic ambiguity as a motivation in the emergence of logophoricity

Chapter 4 demonstrates that a systematic ambiguity within a domain may constitute a motivation in the emergence of a function. The functional domain discussed is the domain of reference. The systematic ambiguity at play is the coding of reference in clausal complements of verbs of saying. More specifically, the question is whether the participants in the complement clause are coreferential with the participant in the matrix clause or whether they are not coreferential. Some languages deploy pronouns in the complement clause to code disjoint reference and person, number, and gender agreement on the verb to code coreference (Polish). Other languages deploy pronouns in the complement clause to code coreference and nouns to code disjoint reference (English). The specific solution described in Chapter 4 are logophoric pronouns which code not only coreference with the subject of the matrix clause but also coreference with other arguments of the matrix clause. The Chapter describes how logophoric coding emerged from the de dicto reference markers.