Gram - SEAS

7. 4 Development of complex sentence constructions 193
In the following example two features show that the fxet clause is in a hypotactic
construction:
(43) ... pohte gif he hi ealle ofsloge, pret se an ne
... thought if he them all slew-SUBJUNCT, that that one not
aetburste pe he sohte.
escape-SUBJUNCf that he sought
' . .. thought that if he slew them all, the one he sought would not escape.'
(c. 1000, JECHoml 5 82. 10)
The reasons for thinking of the fxet-clause here as a complement include:
(a) The clause introduced by fxet is dependent and not appositive, since
it is in the subjunctive, the "irrealis" mood required by the verb /Whte
'thought.'
(b) The complementizer is clearly no longer a pronoun. If it were, one would
expect it to precede the if-clause that depends on /Whte.
However, the second point also shows that the complementizer is associated di­
rectly with the proposition 'the one he sought would not escape,' and is not yet
a marker of the whole dependent structure. Another way of stating this is to say
that fxet is not as fully syntacticized as it is in POE. In POE the incorporation of
the conditional clause into the complement would be favored, as in the modern
translation of (43).
The complement clauses discussed so far have been object complements. We
now turn briefly to subject complements such as are illustrated by POE (44):
(44)
a. It amazes me that they found the purse.
b. That they found the purse amazes me.
It has been assumed for OE that complements in impersonal constructions illus­
trated by predicate constructions such as (4 1) and impersonal constructions such
as (42) are subject complements (Lightfoot 1979). That is, it is assumed that the
subject of 'is foolish' is the entire clause 'that someone despise worldly goods to
win men's praise,' and that the subject of 'shames' is the entire clause 'that we
begin atonement in the way the books teach.' There is no indisputable evidence,
however, that subject complement clauses existed in OE. For one thing there was
in OE a "heavy constituent constraint" that constituents that were long and full
of content words should occur after lighter and shorter constituents. There are no
examples of complements preceding the matrix verb.
Complements in constructions such as (4 1), with adjectival or nominal predi­
cates, may simply have been hypotactic complements of those constituents, just
as the fxet-clause is the complement of weddes in (45):