On the morphosyntactic status of complement-taking predicate clauses in Lithuanian

Abstract

The semantic, functional and structural status of complement-taking predicates (CTPs) has been the subject of considerable debate among linguists during the last decades (cf. Nuyts 1994, 2001; Thompson 2002; Wierzbicka 2006; Boye and Harder 2007; Kaltenböck 2007, 2013; Schneider 2007; Verhagen 2007; Brinton 2008; van Bogaert 2009; Fetzer and Johansson 2010). One of the main structural issues discussed is whether CTPs and CTP clauses, namely constructions like I think (that), they say (that), you see (that), are superordinate main/matrix clauses requiring some specification, which is commonly expressed by a dependent complement clause following them, or whether they should be regarded as dependent and kind of “subordinated” to the complement clauses (Thompson 2002, 155; Verhagen 2007, 215). This paper takes its point of departure from the proposal (Boye and Harder 2007) that it is necessary to distinguish between the lexical and grammaticalized occurrences of CTPs and CTP clauses and discusses whether the proposal is applicable to Lithuanian data. For this purpose, a detailed quantitative and qualitative study of the findings of a corpus-based analysis of four basic types of CTP clauses in Lithuanian has been carried out.