Publications

Publication details [#31125]

Thompson, Sandra A. 2002. “Object complements” and conversation towards a realistic account. Studies in Language 26 (1) : 125–163.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/sl

Annotation

Based on a corpus of conversational English, I argue that the standard view of complements as subordinate clauses in a grammatical relation with a complement-taking predicate is not supported by the data. Rather, what has been described under the heading of complementation can be understood in terms of epistemic/evidential/evaluative formulaic fragments expressing speaker stance toward the content of a clause. This analysis, in which CTPs and their subjects are stored and retrieved as formulaic stance markers accounts for the grammatical, pragmatic, prosodic, and phonological data more satisfactorily than a complementation analysis.