The Size of Clausal Complements

Abstract

Drawing mainly—but not exclusively—on data from Germanic, this article compares syntactic, morphological, and semantic approaches to size differences of complement clauses. Focusing on two phenomena that have been related to clause size reduction and truncation—Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) and restructuring—it is shown that their distribution is radically different and that clause size cannot be the main factor regulating both of these phenomena. This article provides a solution to this conflicting state of affairs and lays out an approach that builds on a fine-grained CP structure, including both syntactic and semantic categories, a reduced structure for infinitives, and a syntax–meaning mapping that predicts different minimal clause sizes for different semantic types of complements. Based on the distribution of ECM in Germanic, a tentative ECM hierarchy is suggested that follows implicational containment relations of an expanded CP. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 10 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.