The Complementizer Phase

This book draws together nine original investigations by leading linguists and promising young scholars on the syntax of complementizers (eg that in She said that she would) and their phrases. The chapters are divided into two parts, each of which highlights aspects of the behaviour and function of complementisers. The first part looks at how and when subjects, or parts of subjects, can and cannot move outside their canonical position in a sentence. Each chapter examines and compares the relevance of a number of syntactic factors in languages such as English, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Brazilian Portuguese and Bavarian. In the second part, the focus turns to the nature and function of complementisers themselves, with discussions drawing on evidence from Italian, Italian dialects, Hebrew, and Dutch. "This important compilation advances our knowledge of the intricate phenomena that take place on the edges of clauses. Every one of the contributions is thought-provoking and challenging, a property that would make the volume an ideal text for a graduate seminar in syntactic theory." Frederick J. Newmeyer Professor Emeritus, University of Washington and Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University The chapters in this volume, drawn from Cyprus Syntaxfest, the most important international linguistics event of 2006, provide exciting and stimulating illustrations of the current theoretical focus on syntactic edge phenomena, and why there is so much to learn from them. Richard K. Larson, Stony Brook University1. Introduction: complementizers and their Phase; PART I: FROM INSIDE THE COMPLEMENTIZER PHASE: (SUB-)EXTRACTION, MAINLY OF SUBJECTS; 2. On Some Properties of Criterial Freezing; 3. (Non-)extraction From Subjects as an Edge Phenomenon; 4. Sub-extraction From Phase Edges; 5. Subjects on the Edge; 6. On the Necessity of Phi-features: The Case of Bavarian Subject Extraction; 7. Apparent Hyper-raising in Brazilian Portuguese: Agreement with Topics Across a Finite CP; PART II: COMPLEMENTISERS THEMSELVES: THEIR FEATURES AND SPECIFIER(S); 8. The Structure and Interpretation of (Romance) Complementizers; 9. Nested Interrogatives and the Locus of wh; 10. Complex wh-phrases don't move: On the Interaction between the Split CP-hypothesis and the Syntax of wh-movement; References; Index