The Complementizer System

Abstract

The focus of discussion in this chapter will be the distribution of those items that we have analyzed as being complementizers. It will be particularly concerned with the phenomenon known traditionally as the ‘Double Relative’ construction (see the references in note 8 of Chapter 2). This is the situation (already alluded to several times) in which we find a relative complementizer introducing a sentential complement where in the normal run of things we expect to find the non-relative complementizer goN. One of the interesting things about this phenomenon is that it seems to be a diagnostic in Irish for the relationship of syntactic binding. The central fact which we will attempt to document and analyze is that any clause into which the binding reaches (any clause, that is, that contains the bound anaphoric element but not the binder) is headed by a relative complementizer. I have left the matter till this late point because I wanted to approach the problem having discussed the indexing procedures of Chapter 4 in some detail. It is this set of rules which define formally the notion of syntactic binding in this model and that provide the basis on which the syntactic and semantic rules operate to account for the configuration of syntactic and semantic data that is associated with the binding relationship. It is the indexing rules then which provide a principled basis for distinguishing just the class of constructions of which the Double Relative phenomenon is characteristic.

For an interesting alternative account of some of these facts, see Hale 1978.