Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Whilst it is well-known that how can introduce both (embedded) interrogative and exclamative clauses in English (Grimshaw 1979), relatively little attention has been paid to the frequent use of how to introduce embedded ‘declarative’ clauses (although see Legate 2010, Nye to appear). In cases such as (1), how does not appear to be associated with a manner or degree reading, much like the canonical declarative complementiser that.

 

(1) a. He told me how she’d never been to Spain

      b. She remembered how after all those years he’d finally stopped smoking.

 

In this talk I will show that clauses introduced by complementiser-like how (CLH) nevertheless exhibit systematic differences to that-clause complements, particularly in terms of their external syntactic distribution. Unlike that-clauses, CLHCs can be the complement to prepositions, and are restricted to occurring under certain matrix predicates: tell, the semi-factives, certain factives and emotive factives. They can occur under predicates which permit wh- but not that-clause complements (e.g. describe, reflect, contemplate) and are excluded from occurring as complements to predicates which permit that- but not wh-clause complements (e.g. believe, suppose, be likely). Overall, they seem to distribute like other wh-clauses, more specifically like embedded exclamatives and resolutive ‘answer-to-question’ interrogatives, which raises questions about the mechanism of complement selection.

 

Yet, in terms of their internal syntax, CLHCs seem to show greater similarities to that-clauses than to wh-clauses. Like that-clauses, and unlike wh-clauses, there are no matrix or non-finite CLHCs. CLH does not behave like a moved wh-operator: it does not show scope effects, and no intervention effect arises from having negation in a CLHC, as Legate (2010) notes.

 

Although the focus of my presentation is primarily on English data, CLHCs are by no means restricted to this language. Data from Basque and Dutch showing the co-occurrence of CLH with a canonical complementiser suggest that CLH is not a C head, pace Willis (2007) and Van Gelderen (2011). In an attempt to unify the external and internal syntactic properties of CLHCs, I explore an analysis of CLHCs in which CLH differs from manner and degree how in its feature composition, and is base-generated in a specifier position high in the left periphery of the embedded clause.

 

References

van Gelderen, Elly (2009). ‘Renewal in the Left Periphery: Economy and the Complementizer Layer’. Transactions of the Philological Society 107: 2, 131-195.

Grimshaw, Jane (1979). ‘Complement selection and the lexicon’. Linguistic Inquiry 10:2. 279-326.

Legate, Julie Anne (2010). ‘On how how is used instead of that’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 28. 121-134.

Nye, Rachel (to appear). ‘The categorial status of Dutch and English declarative hoe-/how-complement clauses’. University of Salford Working Papers in Linguistics.

Willis, D. (2007) Specifier-to-head reanalysis in the complementizer domain: evidence from Welsh. Transactions of the Philological Society 105: 3.432–480.