Universals and variation in clausal complementation

Trying, deciding, wanting, believing, claiming, hoping such concepts of everyday life show intri- cate linguistic properties and a diverse spectrum of variation, both within and across languages, in the way they are expressed and structured syntactically. Theories of clausal complementation investigate how subordinate structures conveying concepts such as beliefs, desires, or attempts tie together syn- tactically and semantically with their superordinate clauses. Grammatical analysis traditionally distin- guishes subordination constructions consisting of two clauses and mono-clausal constructions in which there are two verbal elements (such as auxiliaries) within a single clause. Linguistic restructur- ing designates a class of constructions that are intermediate between these polesthey may look like subordination but show syntactic and semantic properties of a tighter, mono-clausal configuration. Research on complementation and restructuring has revealed different degrees of clausehood along a scale of syntactic complexity. The over-arching hypothesis of the project is that the scale of clause- hood is a fundamental property of language, which reflects an implicational hierarchy of minimal clause size as determined by an interplay of syntactic and semantic properties of embedding. This project examines complementation and clausehood properties in a typologically diverse set of languages, selected with the goal to maximize genetic and areal diversity in the language sample. To obtain exhaustive descriptions of the complementation patterns, initial findings obtained via grammars, data bases, and existing research will be supplemented in consultation with research and language specialists. Special emphasis will be given to the integration of young researchers and stu- dents as part of the research team to provide teaching and training through hands-on research. Since language-specific factors often mask properties common across languages, a direct sur- face-oriented comparison of complementation configurations is not always possible. The tools and resources developed in this projectimplicational hierarchy effects and restructuring signature prop- erties targeting the scale of clausehoodallow approaching the question of what abstract grammatical properties are common to languages and what the extent of variation is. Language diversity and varia- tion are key concepts for understanding the significance of language for the human mind. Questions such as what the relation between language and thought is or how language interrelates with other cognitive systems can only be answered if a comprehensive picture of the properties of languages is available. The typology of complementation thus provides a new testing ground for gaining further insights into the nature of complex mental concepts such as attempts, decisions, desires, beliefs, and as a result the workings of the human mind.

A simple, yet sophisticated, way to expresses thoughts, beliefs, utterances, claims, conjectures, imaginations, hopes, wishes, and many other concepts is via clausal complementation (a.k.a. subordination, embedding). Languages exhibit a variety of different types of complementation, which can be divided into different classes based on their semantic properties (such as interrogative, speech, command) and/or their morphosyntactic properties (such as finite, infinitive, subjunctive, nominalization). A striking observation is that there is a dependency between the meaning of a complementation configuration and the morphosyntactic coding-changing one often results in a change of the other. For instance, the infinitival construction "I forgot to water the plants" entails that I did not water the plants, whereas the finite construction "I forgot that I watered the plants" means that I did water the plants. "Universals and variation in clausal complementation" investigated complementation cross-linguistically with the aim to isolate the common properties found across languages and to catalogue the observed variation. By considering the possible and impossible combinations of semantic and morphosyntactic properties new regularities emerged which point to a possibly universal organization of complementation. The project showed that different types of complement clauses are aligned along an implicational hierarchy, which is defined semantically and detectable through a diverse set of morphological and syntactic properties. Due to the vast cross-linguistic variation found in the morphosyntactic coding of complement clauses, it is impossible to find common properties by considering only the distribution of absolute surface forms. Implicational hierarchies have the advantage that they allow the formulation of relational restrictions of the form 'if a complement of a particular type displays a specific property, all complements higher/lower on the hierarchy also display that property.' Since implicational hierarchies can bring out abstract and deep connections between grammatical properties, they are a powerful and useful tool for studying linguistic variation. The implicational complementation hierarchy was based on properties of semantic (in)dependence between the main clause predicate and the embedded clause. The most independent types of complements are utterance (say, claim) and belief (think, believe) statements, which show no restrictions on the nature of the embedded subject or tense. Less independent types of complements are command, intention and decision statements (order, plan, decide), which involve forward expanded unrealized events and show some independence and some dependence properties. The most dependent types of complements are attempt (try) and implicative statements (forget, manage) which require subject and tense sharing. Employing this implicational complementation hierarchy, the project was able to formulate several explicit, restrictive and falsifiable hypotheses. Some of the specific phenomena investigated in-depth involved the distribution of finiteness and the nature of dependencies such as case and agreement established across different types of complement clauses.