proto-southwestern-tai revised: a new reconstruction - seals 22

146 Amara Prasithrathsint
surprised me by extraposition of you called last night and insertion of that
complementizer. In case there is no extraposition, we can apply the rules “it”deletion and
“that” insertion. The result will be That you called last night surprised me. The clause that
you called last night, which functions either as the subject or the complement of the verb
surprised, is normally labelled a complement clause or sentential complement.
Studies on complementation and complementizers in several languages reveal that
it is typical to have more than one complementizer. In English, for instance, eight
complementizers are generally accepted, with that is the best-known complementizer
accepted by everyone. In addition to that, for-to and poss-ing (gerund) are also regarded as
complementizers in Transformational-Generative Grammar (see Akmajian 1977). Five
more are also added to the list (see Dirven 1989:113-139, Horie 2000: 12); i.e., to (with
infinitive), zero (bare infinitive), -ing (participle), whether/if, and wh-word. The following
are examples of how the eight complementizers in English are used. Note that the + sign
means ‘occurring with’.
(1) to (+infinitive): It’s easy to park your car here.
(2) for-to (+NP, infinitive): It’s important for us to get there first.
(3) zero (bare infinitive): I saw him enter the building
(4) -ing (participle): I saw him entering the building
(5) poss-ing (gerund): I always enjoyed his/him singing that song.
(6) that (+clause): I saw that he entered the building
(7) whether/if (+clause): I don’t know whether he entered the building.
(8) wh-word (+clause): I don’t know who entered the building
Besides English, variation in the use of complementizers is also found in other
languages, such as French (Archard 1998, Tasmowski 1989), German (Cinque 1989),
Dutch (Besten and Rutten 1989, Koster 1989), Spanish (Delbecque 2000), Portuguese
(Quicoli 1982), Japanese ( Horie 2000, Suzuki 2000), and Korean (Horie 2000).
Certain studies even arrive at a further step so as to show how complementizers and
verb categorization are related. In French, for example, it has been found that the choice of
a complementizer depends on the class of verb it occurs with. Archard (1998: 93-94) found
that two classes of verbs in French related to infinitival complement clauses; they are
perception verbs, and causation verbs, as in (9) and (10), respectively. Other classes of
verbs--verbs of volition, verbs of declaration, and verbs of thoughts and beliefs are
compatible with que (that)-complement clauses, as in (11), (12), (13).