Jane Grimshaw - SAC 304

This talk will be on Friday, November 13th at 3:30 in SAC 304.

Title:
that’s nothing: the grammar of complementizer omissibility

Jane Grimshaw

Rutgers University
(grimshaw@ruccs.rutgers.edu)

SUNY Stonybrook November 2009
Abstract:
It is often said that the English complementizer that is optional, but in fact its distribution is quite complex, and can be understood only if it is seen as the result of interaction among several factors.
This presentation argues that omissibility of the complementizer that in English complement clauses is limited to clauses which have active discourse potential like that of a main clause: they are “quasi-subordinate”, as in Dayal and Grimshaw (2009). The clauses have content that is not already in the common ground (i.e. presupposed) and they report the holding or expressing of opinions (Cf. Dor 2005). Following Grimshaw (2006) quasi-subordinate clauses are subject to both the well-formedness constraints governing main clauses and those governing true subordinates. In the grammar of the informal register of English, the constraint regulating the complementizer in main clauses dominates the constraint regulating the complementizer in subordinate clauses, and the complementizer is omitted. In the grammar of the formal register the other ranking holds and the complementizer is present.
Contrary to widespread belief, very few semantic classes of embedding predicates allow omission. Those that do not allow omission have complements which are weak islands. This investigation thus connects two previously unrelated properties of subordinate clauses.
What is required for omission is the right lexical semantics for the embedding predicate, the right discourse status of the complement, and the grammar of the the right register. Unless all three match up properly, omission is not possible.
It follows from this line of analysis that:
that-less subordinate clauses look like main clauses;
certain syntactic configurations never allow omission;
omission is impossible with high register predicates regardless of their meaning;
omission is strongly correlated with other properties of clauses such as the presence of 1st and 2nd person forms;
omission is virtually absent from academic text.
Selected Readings:
Biber, Douglas. 1999. A Register Perspective on Grammar and Discourse. Discourse Studies 1. 131-150.
Cattell Ray. 1978. On the source of interrogative adverbs. Language 54. 61-77.
Dayal, Veneeta and Jane Grimshaw. 2009. Subordination at the interface. Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University. At: http://rulinguistics101.org/page/grimshaw.html
Dor, Daniel. 2005. Toward a semantic account of that-deletion in English. Linguistics 43:345–382
Grimshaw, Jane.2006. Location specific constraints in matrix and subordinate clauses. ROA 857-0806. http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?id=1207