Crosslinguistic variation in the clausal skeleton: multiple complementizer structures, a comparative analysis of english, spanish and basque

Abstract

In the last decades, much effort has been devoted to investigating the functional structure dominating IP: the so-called left-periphery of the clause. Research conducted on this topic has attempted to characterize the maximal projections in that functional periphery, establish their hierarchical structure, and account for the variation observed crosslinguistically. In this paper, I will extend this line of research by examining multiple complementizer constructions.

While these structures are not frequently discussed in traditional grammars, it is common to find them in everyday speech or written production. Besides, among the languages in the vicinity, instances of it have been attested in English as well as in Romance languages (see a.o. Villa-García 2012, 2015, 2019; Demonte & Fernández-Soriano 2013 and Radford 2018). Still, although linguists have thoroughly studied the mentioned phenomenon in Spanish, it has not been so extensively analysed in English. As far as Basque is concerned, it has never been investigated before.

The goal of this paper is fourfold. (i) First, to present Spanish multiple complementizer structures and discuss if all of them are corresponding and, thus, they belong to the same syntactic structure. (ii) Second, to examine if English has counterparts of present-day Spanish multiple complementizer structures. (iii) Third, to study the linguistic environment and function that multiple complementizer constructions shared by English and Spanish have. (iv) Fourth, to discuss, for the first time, how the counterparts of Spanish and English multiple complementizer structures look like in Basque, to exhibit the similarities and differences, and to offer a tentative analysis of their properties.

By discussing all these questions, we will try to offer a better crosslinguistic characterization of the properties displayed by these constructions. Likewise, we will summarize some of the theoretical advances that have refined the functional phrases of the left-periphery, leading to significant changes in the way in which this functional domain is currently conceived.

The main conceptual conclusions derived from this paper regarding multiple complementizer structures in the languages under analysis can be summarized as follows:

(i) The standard description of these structures raises an important theoretical problem since functional projections like complementizer phrases are assumed not to iterate in the same clause. However, it will be shown that the functional elements repeated in each structure display different properties and, consequently, should be defined as heading different functional categories of the left-periphery.

(ii) Spanish has, at least, three different structures involving multiple complementizers (namely, recomplementation, jussive/optative, and pleonastic constructions); English has recomplementation and, following Villa-García (2015), also the jussive/optative structure.

(iii) At first sight, Basque seems to disallow multiple complementizer structures, since there is no instance where a complementizer is repeated twice in the same clause. However, given the crosslinguistic variation found in the realisation of functional elements in recomplementation, there is an alternative analysis: the –(e)la complementizer would correspond to a primary complementizer sitting in ForceP and there would be a non-overt non-primary complementizer in [head, TopP]. If this analysis is possible, then Basque would also have multiple complementizer structures, but in a masked way.