A constructionist approach to complementation: evidence from Ancient Greek *.(Report)

Abstract

This article deals with the representation of complement sentences in a speaker's mental grammar, and the contribution of complement-taking predicates and complement clause types to the overall meaning of the complement sentence. Either complement-taking predicates alone, or both complement-taking predicates and complement clause types have been argued to have meanings that contribute to the overall meaning of the complement sentence. The article examines the distribution of various complement clause types in Ancient Greek, and argues that this distribution is best accounted for in a constructionist model In this model individual combinations of complement-taking predicates and complement clause types are constructions, that is, grammatical entities independent of the words in the sentence, with both formal structure and semantic and pragmatic content. The latter is associated with the combination "complement-taking predicate + complement clause type" as a whole, rather than being part of the mental representation of either the complement-taking predicate or the complement-clause type as such. Form-meaning relations in complement constructions are also discussed

1. Introduction

This article deals with the representation of complement sentences in a speaker's mental grammar. By complement sentence is meant, following Noonan (1985: 42), a complex sentence where a clause (the complement clause) functions as an argument of a main predicate (the complementtaking predicate). Some examples of complement sentences in English are provided below (the complement clause is in square brackets):

(1) I heard him [playing the piano]

(2) He told me [that he would write]

Work on complement sentences, both crosslinguistically and within individual languages, has revealed the existence of systematic correlations between complement clause types and complement-taking predicates (see, among others, Givon 1980, 2001b: Ch. 12; Noonan 1985; Ransom 1986; Cristofaro 2003: Ch. 5). Particular complement clause types can only be used with particular complement-taking predicates, and, conversely, particular complement-taking predicates require particular complement clause types, and disallow others. For instance, in English, desiderative predicates like want can only take infinitive complements, while knowledge predicates like know usually take indicative complements. (1) In addition, some predicates can take more than one complement clause type, with a change in the meaning of the sentence. In English, utterance predicates like tell take indicative complements when reporting somebody's statement (as in [2]), but infinitive complements when reporting a command or a suggestion: