on the so-called "matrix complementizer"

[claude-hagege]

In reply to A. Puglieli's query, I would also mention Béarnais que. It is cited and commented upon in C. Hagège, "Intonation, fonctions syntaxiques, chaîne-système et universaux des langues", BSLP LXIII, 1, 1978 (by the way, language universals were studied long before they aroused a renewed interest in the beginning of the 1990s), 8, fn. 4. It is recalled in this passage that this que ([ke]) is not compatible with e, which is one of the Béarnais interrogative morphemes: the sentence must contain either of them, but not both. Other details on Béarnais que are to be found in J. Bouzet, Syntaxe béarnaise et gasconne, Pau:
Marrimpouey, 1963, and in A. Joly, "Que et les autres morphème énonciatifs du béarnais: essai de psychosystématique", in Actes du 13ème Congrès de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes, Québec, 1976, 411-433.
    I do not think that this morpheme has much to do with the (sentence-final) yo and -ta, of, respectively, Japanese and Korean, or, for that matter, with the equivalent morphemes in Burmese, Moore, etc. Nor can it be considered as an evidentiality marker. To the best of my knowledge, all Béarnais informants with whom I did some field-work use it (and claim that they use it!) as a marker of a very strong assertion, 
i. e., I would say, as an asseverative morpheme (as is also witnessed by a famous sentence uttered in Pau, some years ago, by a French Education Minister, himself a native Béarnais).
    Now, the notion of "matrix complementizer" cannot be made sense of, short of using it in a diachronic  acceptation. And precisely, it turns out that this que most likely has a discourse origin: specialists of the history of Gascon (the western variant of Occitan, and the dialectal set of which Béarnais is a part) assign it a former use as a complementizer after declarative verbs like "say", "affirm" etc. This is not to say that (!) I side with J.R. Ross when he writes ("On declarative sentences", in Jacobs and Rosenbaum, eds., Readings in transformational grammar, Boston: Ginn, 1970) that a hyperverb "say" underlies any affirmative sentence. It simply turns out that this opinion, framed in a formalist conception of languages, can receive some support from historical facts like the formation of Béarnais que.

(va da sé, cara Anamaria, che se avessi da scriverLe a Lei individualmente, lo farei in italiano)

Warmest regards to everybody ,

Claude.
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