[Lingtyp] what is designated by a complement clause

Mon May 8 14:05:19 UTC 2023

Dear Christian – May I recommend the following heuristic procedure:

  *   Complements of cognitive attitude predicates (believe, doubt, etc.) ought to express propositions.
  *   Complements of phasal predicates (begin, end) and ‘psych action’ predicates (attempt, failure) ought to describe events (but express event types).

This should give you two diagnostic contexts. If complements in these two environments are structurally different in the language in question, I would adopt the working hypothesis that the construction that occurs in the first type of context expresses propositions and the one that occurs in the second expresses event types.

If there’s a finiteness contrast between the two in the language in question, I would predict complements that occur in the first type of context to be finite and complements that occur in the second to be nonfinite. The semantic motivation underlying this putative finiteness contrast is that propositions are typically (though not necessarily, as in habitual and generic propositions) about individual events, whereas complements that occur in the second type of environment express event types, which are kinds (Parsons 1990).

I would not, however, use finiteness as a diagnostic property itself, since it’s a morphosyntactic phenomenon, even if it is semantically motivated. In this sense, finiteness is at most a weak heuristic.

Something similar goes for negation: propositional complements ought to be negatable, whereas eventive complements may or may not be negatable, and negating them may be more awkward, whatever that means.

I would be interested in hearing from people who are aware of languages in which this heuristic procedure yields problematic results. A problematic result would *not* be a language using a single uniform complement type in the two contexts or lacking syntactic complements altogether, but rather a language that does have multiple types of syntactic complements, but their distribution cuts across the proposed diagnostic context or weak heuristic correlates (finiteness, negation) are mismatched vis-à-vis the predictions.

Best – Juergen

Parsons, T. (1990). Events in the semantics of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Christian Lehmann <christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de>
Date: Monday, May 8, 2023 at 4:37 AM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] what is designated by a complement clause

Dear colleagues,

as a non-specialist in these matters, I have always been struggling with the distinction between what Lyons 1977 (Semantics) calls second-order and third-order entities. They are also called situations (a.k.a. events or states of affairs) and thoughts (or propositions), resp. A complement clause may designate one or the other. For instance, the that clause in ex. 1 designates a situation, the one of ex. 2 designates a thought (or at any rate, a third-order entity).

1) Linda saw that John arrived.

2) Linda said that John arrived.

In some cases, English grammar distinguishes these notions. For instance, the that clause of ex. 1, but not the one of ex. 2, may be replaced by John’s arrival.

Besides such relatively clear cases, there are less clear ones.

3) Linda remembered reading the book.

4) Linda remembered to read the book.

Replacement by perusal seems to show (unless my English fails me) that the complement clause of ex. 3 designates a situation while the one of ex. 4 designates a thought. If so, the superordinate predicate would not always determine the type of dependent clause.

Here is my question: Does anyone know of a generally applicable criterion or even a language-independent test frame which enables me to determine whether a given dependent clause designates a second-order or a third-order entity? Or are there contexts which are indeterminate in principle or where the distinction does not apply? I would be very grateful for advice.

Yours as always,

Christian
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