Gram - SEAS

188 7 Grammaticalization across clauses
Another source of complementizers is closely associated with nominal forms,
hardly a surprising factor when we consider that complements are essentially
clauses functioning as NPs. One nominal source of complementizers is pronouns.
We will discuss the history of pronominal deictic that below in Section 7.4.1.
Other nominal sources include case morphemes of various types. These may be
prepositions or postpositions, including case prefixes and suffixes attached to a
verb phrase or nominalized form of the verb. The following is from the Tungusic
language Evenki:
(27) ;lnii-m ;I;I-c;I;I-n saa-r;l si t;ln;lw;I ;lm;l-n;l;l-w;l;l-S.
mother-my NEG-PAST-3SG know-(?) you yesterday come-PART-ACC-2SG
'My mother doesn't know that you arrived yesterday.' (Comrie 1981: 83)
The accusative case morpheme is added to the resultative participle of the
verb come and the participle is seen to be nominal from both the case end­
ing and the second-person-singular possessor suffix. Genetti (1991) provides
a detailed account of the development of postpositions into subordinators in
Newari, and of cross-linguistic evidence of similar changes in other Tibeto-Burman
languages.
Often the parallelism with an ordinary noun phrase is obvious, as in instances
such as the Evenki one in (27), and in English:
(28) a. He left without telling the guide.
b. He left without his compass.
Sometimes the similarity is not so clear because the historical origins have become
obscured. For example, in English the infinitive in to functions as the object of
some complement-taking verbs, but the parallelism with the "allative" proposition
to may not seem obvious:
(29) a. We want to ask you a few questions.
b. We handed the box to the officer.
Absent historical data, one might wrongly assume that the two instances of to were
simply fortuitous homonyms. However, because the reanalysis of a dative-allative
particle as a complementizer is widespread, it is methodologically appropriate to
assume that there might indeed be some motivation for the form. For instance, in
Maori ki is both a dative and an allative, and is a complementizer with the same
kinds of verbs as English want, etc.:
(30) a. Allative
E hoki ana
PRES return PROG
'I am going back to the village.'
au ki te kaainga.
to the village