On the Distribution of Null Complementizers

Abstract

The article provides a comprehensive account of the distribution of the null complementizer in English that does not appeal to the notion of government, thus contributing to the minimalist goal of eliminating arbitrary relations such as government. The account is based on Pesetsky's (1992) proposal that the null complementizer is a PF affix, which we instantiate through the affix-hopping approach to affixation. We also provide an account of several subject/object asymmetries with respect to extraction out of various clausal arguments.Until the advent of the Minimalist Program, the notion of government played a pervasive role in principles-and-parameters approaches to the theory of grammar. Since then, because of the arbitrary nature of the relation, the role of government has been reevaluated. Most phenomena where Government-Binding Theory assumed government to be crucially involved are handled under minimalism without an appeal to government. do not involve government.One phenomenon that still awaits a principled nongovernment account is the licensing of the null complementizer (C) in English. Consider the following data:(1) a. (?)It was widely believed [ CP C [ IP he liked linguistics]]. b. It was widely believed [ CP that [ IP he liked linguistics]]. (2) a. *[ CP C [ IP He liked linguistics]] was widely believed. b. [ CP That [ IP he liked linguistics]] was widely believed.We are grateful to Klaus Abels and two anonymous LI reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to students and faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut and to Stephen Crain and the undergraduate students in his class at the University of Maryland for help with judgments. As is standard in the literature, the judgments reported in this article are intended as relative rather than absolute, and most of the data was collected by soliciting relative judgments between pairs of examples.

A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001–2010

“…The other 21% contained discussion in the text surrounding the data point that implied a control condition that any professional syntactician could construct for themselves. Furthermore, the relative frequency of pairwise phenomena has been explicitly recognized in both the experimental syntax literature (e.g., Bard et al, 1996;Myers, 2009a), and the theoretical syntax literature (as Bošković and Lasnik, 2003:527 put it, "As is standard in the literature, the judgments reported in this article are intended as relative rather than absolute, and most of the data was collected by soliciting relative judgments between pairs of examples."). Beyond being a relatively frequent source of evidence in syntactic theory, pairwise phenomena are also a relatively useful source of evidence.…”

A New Outlook of Complementizers

“…The first approach focuses on clausal complements of non-factive predicates of the type in (1a), where overt and null COMPs freely alternate. The main goal of this research is to investigate the structures of overt and null COMPs, and explain how the null COMP is allowed in addition to the overt COMP in this environment [2][3][4]. The second approach explores clausal complements of factive predicates of the type in (1b), assuming that the COMP is obligatory [5][6][7][8].…”

“…Otherwise, only a single C head is projected for economy reasons, which can remain null or be spelled out as that. In other words, the structure of 4 The head d in (7) is light in the sense that it lacks ϕ-features. We will further explain the nature of the light d head in Section 2.2.…”

“…On the other hand, true factive predicates such as regret, which do not allow a null COMP and RTs in its clausal complement, take a nominal complement, whose head is lexicalized by that, as shown in (7). 4 Finally, semi-factive predicates such as know and realize, may take the clausal complements in (6) or the nominal complement in (7). For speakers who permit neither the null COMP nor RTs in this environment, they have access to the structure in (7) for both strong and semi-factives.…”

Bulgarian relative and factive clauses with an invariant complementizer

“…(64c), indicating that in (64b), the null P is not licensed due to lack of adjacency with the verb. Such an explanation 51 is strongly reminiscent of Bošković and Lasnik's (2003) account of English null C, according to which null C is lexically specified as an affix, so if for some reason affixation is blocked, the PF merger of the affix cannot take place. No analogous configuration involving a null P is to be supposed for the corresponding če clause, if the contrast between (64b) and (64d) is taken at its face value, namely the če clauses is a sentential complement rather than a relative clause even if embedded under a factive verb.…”