Complementiser-deletion: a comparative study

Abstract

This dissertation is a formal linguistic study of the analogous polygenetic emergence and optional omissibility of a syncretic that-type complementiser across the Germanic (Part I), Romance (Part II), “Balkan” (Part III) and Celtic (Part IV) branches of the Indo-European family. Part I focuses on the Germanic branch, especially on Old English. Part II focuses on the Italic branch, especially on Italian. Part III is a spin-off of part II, as it analyses some “dialectal” southern-Italian varieties, such as Salentino and Calabrian: these Romance languages are argued to bear the influence of a historically tenacious Greek/Balkan influence (directly as well as indirectly through the Grico non-Romance Greek variety on the Romance varieties in the area) with a double complementation system (which makes a quintessentially Balkan distinction between a [+realis] and a [+irrealis] complementiser). Part IV focuses on the Celtic branch, with particular interest on old and modern Irish. Each chapter consists of a historical introduction of the specific Indo-European branch, followed by an etymological explanation of the origins of its complementisers (and the PIE *t/d, *s, *k sounds typically characterising them), paired with a syntactic explanation of their polygenetic emergence in the modern languages within the wider framework of a synthetic-to-analytic pan-Indo-European trend. A specific part of each chapter is devoted to the possibility of omitting these complementisers, and the possible syntactic accounts for this phenomenon, especially in terms of Chomskian generative grammar, but also in diachronic and etymological developmental terms. Finally, Part V analyses these phenomena (relative and clausal complementation with that-type complementisers, as well as the possibility of omitting them) in a synchronic and diachronic perspective, comparing them to other languages that show a similar pattern especially in relation to the oldest attested Indo-European “dialects” (therefore, closer to the hypothesised PIE language): this parts concludes with an overarching explanation to the phenomenon of that-deletion in terms of diachronic rigidification of word-order and intensification of the analytic features.