Cover not available
Article published In:
Variation in C: Comparative approaches to the Complementizer Phrase
Edited by Jacopo Garzonio and Silvia Rossi
[Linguistic Variation 18:2] 2018
► pp. 336–358

Speaker-oriented syntax and root clause complementizers

| University of Vienna
| University of Vienna
The object of study of this paper is a Romance construction characterized by the presence of the complementizer in root clauses and by an evidential or epistemic meaning (i.e. C-constructions). In these structures, the complementizer is preceded by a functional element that morphologically coincides with an adjective or an adverb. From a morphosyntactic viewpoint, we show that these structures are monoclausal and that the epistemic or evidential item preceding the complementizer has undergone a process of grammaticalization becoming a functional element. As for their use and interpretation, we describe their primary semantic meaning, as well as their pragmatic extensions and functions, which involve subjectification and intersubjectivity. We finally propose a syntactic configuration that can account for C-constructions and their properties in the syntax representation. This configuration involves the assumption of a projection – in fact, a set of projections – above ForceP which encode speaker-oriented and pragmatic features (e.g. evaluative, evidential, epistemic values).
Keywords: evidential, epistemic, complementizer, speech act phrase, sentience domain, emphasis, Romance, left periphery, adverbs, subjectification, intersubjectivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Monoclausality and root complementation
    • 2.1Against the copula-omission analysis
    • 2.2Syntactic distribution and the position of the complementizer
  • 3.The functional element preceding the complementizer
    • 3.1Subjective vs. objective readings
    • 3.2Beyond subjectivity: The interpretation of C-constructions with an anaphoric CP
  • 4.Discourse-oriented syntax and emphasis
  • 5.Conclusions and final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.16009.cru
References
Bianchi, Valentina & Mara Frascarelli
2010 Is topic a root phenomenon?. Iberia 2(1). 43.88.Google Scholar
Bonami, Olivier & Danielle Godard
2007 Quelle syntaxe, incidemment, pour les adverbes incidents? Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris CII1. 255–284. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Breitbath, Anne, Karen De Clercq & Liliane Haegeman
(eds.) 2013 Polarity emphasis: distribution and locus of licensing (Special Issue of Lingua 128).Google Scholar
Calaresu, Emilia
2004 Testuali parole. La dimensione pragmatica e testuale del discorso riportato. Pavia: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo
1999 Adverbs and functional heads. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Colasanti, Valentina & Giuseppina Silvestri
2019 Matrix complementizers in Italo-Romance. In Silvio Cruschina, Adam Ledgeway & Eva-Maria Remberger (eds.), Italian dialectology at the interfaces, 155–183. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corr, Alice
2016 Ibero-Romance and the Syntax of the Utterance. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
CREA – Real Academia española: Banco de datos (CREA) [online]
. Corpus de referencia del español actual. [URL] (20 December 2014).
Cruschina, Silvio
2011 Tra dire e pensare: Casi di grammaticalizzazione in italiano e in siciliano. La Lingua Italiana: Storia, Strutture, Testi 71. 105–125.Google Scholar
2015 The expression of evidentiality and epistemicity: Cases of grammaticalization in Italian and Sicilian. Probus 271. 1–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio & Eva-Maria Remberger
2008 Hearsay and reported speech: Evidentiality in Romance. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 331. 95–116.Google Scholar
2017 Before the complementizer: Adverb types and root clause modification. In: Martin Hummel & Salvador Valera (eds.), Adjective-adverb interfaces in Romance, 81–109. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Demonte, Violeta & Olga Fernández Soriano
2014 Evidentiality and illocutionary force. Spanish matrix que at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In Andreas Dufter & Álvaro O. de Toledo (eds.), Left sentence peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, variationist, and typological perspectives, 217–252. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Dendale, Patrick & Tasmowski, Liliane
2001 Introduction: Evidentiality and related notions. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3). 339–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Etxepare, Ricardo
1997 The grammatical representation of speech events. PhD dissertation, Maryland.Google Scholar
2008 On quotative constructions in Iberian Spanish. In Ritva Laury (ed.), Crosslinguistic studies of clause combining: The multifunctionality of conjunctions, 35–77. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 From hearsay evidentiality to samesaying relations. Lingua 1201. 604–627. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Finegan, Edward
1995 Subjectivity and subjectivisation: An introduction. In Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation, 1–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara & Roland Hinterhölzl
2007 Types of topics in German and Italian. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form, 87–116. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garzonio, Jacopo & Poletto Cecilia
2015 On polarity particles in Italian varieties. In Josef Bayer, Roland Hinterhölzl & Andreas Trotzke (eds.), Discourse-oriented syntax, 211–228. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giorgi, Alessandra
2010 About the speaker. Towards a syntax of indexicality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
González, Montserrat
2014 Evidentiality, intersubjectivity and salience in Spanish and Catalan markers claro/clar and la verdad/veritat . Intercultural Pragmatics 11(3). 409–434. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grevisse, Maurice & André Goosse
2008 Le bon usage (14th ed.). Brussels: De Boeck & Larcier.Google Scholar
Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier
2001 Spanish exclamatives and the semantics of the left periphery. In Johan Rooryck, Yves de Hulst & Jan Schroten (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 1999: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 99 (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 221), 167–194. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Spanish root exclamatives at the syntax/semantics Interface. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 71. 117–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane & Virginia Hill
2013 The syntacticization of discourse. In Raffaella Folli, Christina Sevdali & Robert Truswell (eds.), Syntax and its limits, 370–390. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hernanz, Maria Lluïsa
2007 From polarity to modality: Some (a)symmetries between bien and si in Spanish. In Luis Eguren & Olga Fernández Soriano (eds.), Coreference, modality, and focus: Studies on the syntax-semantics interface, 133–169. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hill, Virginia
2007 Romanian adverbs and the pragmatic field. The Linguistic Review 241. 61–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Main clause că ‘that’ in Romanian. Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics 12(2). 5–16.Google Scholar
2012 A main clause complementizer. In Lobke Aelbrecht, Liliane Haegeman & Rachel Nye (eds.), Main clause phenomena: New horizons, 279–296. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hinterhölzl, Roland & Nicola Munaro
2015 On the interpretation of modal particles in non-assertive speech acts in German and Bellunese. In Josef Bayer, Roland Hinterhölzl & Andreas Trotzke (eds.), Discourse-oriented syntax, 41–70. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Höhle, Tilman
1992 Über Verum-Fokus im Deutschen. Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 41. 112–141.Google Scholar
Klein, Wolfgang
1994 Time in language. London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kocher, Anna
2014 Claro que son adverbios: Análisis de un proceso de gramaticalización. MA thesis, University of Vienna.Google Scholar
2017 From verum to epistemic modality and evidentiality: On the emergence of the Spanish Adv+C construction. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7(1/2). 77–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika
1981 The notional category of modality. Hans J. Eikmeyer & Hannes Rieser, (eds.), Worlds, words, and contexts, 38–74. De Gruyter, Berlin. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krifka, Manfred
2013 Response particles as propositional anaphors. Proceedings of SALT 231. 1–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
La Repubblica – Corpus
. [URL] (31 January 2015).
López-Couso, María José & Belén Méndez-Naya
2015 Epistemic/evidential markers of the type verb + complementizer. Some parallels from English and Romance. In Andrew D. M. Smith, Graeme Trousdale & Richard Waltereit (eds.), New directions in grammaticalization research, 93–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Lorenzetti, Luca
2002 Sulla grammaticalizzazione di dice nell’italiano parlato. In Sabine Heinemann, Gerald Bernhard & Dieter Kattenbusch (eds.), Roma et Romania. Festschrift für Gerhard Ernst zum 65. Geburtstag, 211–221. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Lyons, John
1977 Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura
2001 Exclamative constructions. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language typology and language universals, 1038–1050. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Molinier, Christian & Françoise Levrier
2000 Grammaire des adverbs. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar
Munaro, Nicola
2019 On the syntactic encoding of lexical interjections in Italo-Romance. In Silvio Cruschina, Adam Ledgeway & Eva-Maria Remberger (eds.), Italian dialectology at the interfaces, 185–202. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
NGLE – Real Academia Española
2009 Nueva gramática de la lengua española, 21 Vols. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.Google Scholar
Nuyts, Jan
2001 Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3). 383–400. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Plungian, Vladimir Aleksandrovič
2001 The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space. Studies in Language 12(1). 349–357.Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia & Raffaella Zanuttini
2013 Emphasis as reduplication: Evidence from sì che/no che sentences. Lingua 1281. 124–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Radford, Andrew
2013 The complementiser system in spoken English: Evidence from broadcast media. In María Victoria Camacho Taboada, Ángel Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González & Mariano Reyes-Tejedor (eds.), Information structure and agreement, 11–54. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reichenbach, Hans
1947 Elements of symbolic logic. New York: MacMillan.Google Scholar
Rett, Jessica
2011 Exclamatives, degrees, and speech acts. Linguistics and Philosophy 341. 411–442. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi
1997 The fine structure of the left periphery. In Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 Locality and left periphery. In Adriana Belletti (ed.), Structures and beyond. The cartography of syntactic structures, volume 31, 223–251. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rodríguez-Espiñeira, María José
2014 Emergencia e historia de la construcción es capaz que . In Maria Bargalló Escrivà, María del Pilar Garcés Gómez & Cecilio Garriga Escribano (eds.), Llaneza. Estudios ofrecidos a Juan Gutiérrez Cuadrado, 205–218. A Coruña: Anexo de la Revista de Lexicografía.Google Scholar
Romero, Maribel & Chung-hye Han
2004 On negative yes/no questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5). 609–658. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rooth, Mats
1992 A Theory of Focus Interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 11. 75–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Servidio, Emilio
2014 Polarity particles in Italian: Focus, fragments, tags. Doctoral dissertation, University of Siena.Google Scholar
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie & Karin Aijmer
2007 The semantic field of modal certainty: A corpus-based study of English adverbs. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Speas, Peggy & Carol L. Tenny
2003 Configurational properties of point of view roles. In Anna Maria Di Sciullo (ed.), Asymmetry in grammar, 315–344. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Suñer, Avel·lina & Àngela Di Tullio
2014 Bare adjectives as syncretic forms. Borealis 3(1). 23–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C.
1995 Subjectification in grammaticalization. In Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation, 31–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1989 On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 651. 31–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 (Inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification: A reassessment. In Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelotte & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Subjectification, intersubjectification and grammaticalization, 29–71. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan & Plungian, Vladimir Aleksandrovič
1998 Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2(1). 79–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wiltschko, Martina
2014 The universal structure of categories. Towards a formal typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zanuttini, Raffaella & Paul Portner
2003 Exclamative clauses: at the syntax-semantics interface. Language 79(3). 39–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

LÉGER, Catherine, Marcus LUNGUINHO & Patrícia RODRIGUES
2021. VER EM FRANCÊS ACADIANO E PORTUGUÊS BRASILEIRO: CODIFICAÇÃO DE IMPERATIVO E SALIÊNCIA TEXTUAL. Alfa: Revista de Linguística (São José do Rio Preto) 65 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 october 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.