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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>In reply to A. Puglieli's query, I would also
mention Béarnais <EM>que</EM>. It is cited and commented upon in C.
Hagège, "Intonation, fonctions syntaxiques, chaîne-système et universaux
des langues", <EM>BSLP </EM>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 <EM>que</EM> ([ke])
is not compatible with <EM>e</EM>, which is one of the Béarnais interrogative
morphemes: the sentence must contain either of them, but not both. Other details
on Béarnais <EM>que </EM>are to be found in J. Bouzet, <EM>Syntaxe béarnaise et
gasconne</EM>, Pau:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Marrimpouey, 1963, and in A. Joly, "<EM>Que </EM>et les
autres morphème énonciatifs du béarnais: essai de psychosystématique", in
<EM>Actes du 13ème Congrès de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes</EM>, Québec,
1976, 411-433.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3>I do not think that
this morpheme has much to do with the (sentence-final) <EM>yo</EM> and
-<EM>ta</EM>, 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, </FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT size=3>i. e., I would say, as an
<U>asseverative</U> morpheme (as is also witnessed by a famous sentence uttered
in Pau, some years ago, by a French Education Minister, himself a native
Béarnais).</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3>Now, the notion of
"matrix complementizer" cannot be made sense of, short of using it in a
<STRONG>diachronic </STRONG> acceptation. And precisely, it turns out
that this <EM>que</EM> 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., <EM>Readings in transformational grammar</EM>, 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
<EM>que.</EM></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><EM><FONT face=Arial></FONT></EM> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>(va da sé, cara Anamaria, che se avessi da scriverLe a Lei
individualmente, lo farei in italiano)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Warmest regards to everybody ,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Claude.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>