events and series

that’s nothing: the grammar of complementizer omissibility

Jane Grimshaw (Rutgers University)
November 12, 2009 (Thursday)
4:15 - 6:15 PM; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

It is often said that the English complementizer that is optional, but in fact its distribution is quite complex, and can be understood only if it is seen as the result of interaction among several factors.

This presentation argues that omissibility of the complementizer that in English complement clauses is limited to clauses which have active discourse potential like that of a main clause: they are “quasi-subordinate”, as in Dayal and Grimshaw (2009). The clauses have content that is not already in the common ground (i.e. presupposed) and they report the holding or expressing of opinions (Cf. Dor 2005). Following Grimshaw (2006) quasi-subordinate clauses are subject to both the well-formedness constraints governing main clauses and those governing true subordinates. In the grammar of the informal register of English, the constraint regulating the complementizer in main clauses dominates the constraint regulating the complementizer in subordinate clauses, and the complementizer is omitted. In the grammar of the formal register the other ranking holds and the complementizer is present.

It follows from this line of analysis that:

very few semantic classes of embedding predicates allow omission;
that-less subordinate clauses look like main clauses;
certain syntactic configurations never allow omission;
omission is impossible with high register predicates regardless of their meaning;
omission is strongly correlated with other properties of clauses such as the presence of 1st and 2nd person forms;
omission is virtually absent from academic text.

Dayal, Veneeta and Jane Grimshaw. 2009. Subordination at the interface. Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University.
Dor, Daniel. 2005. Toward a semantic account of that-deletion in English. Linguistics 43:345–382
Grimshaw, Jane. 2006. Location specific constraints in matrix and subordinate clauses. ROA 857-0806.