Syncretisms with the Nominal Complementizer

Abstract

AbstractNominal complementizers (e.g. Eng.that, Fr.que) often have the same morphophonological form as other grammatical items, such as demonstrative, relative, and wh‐pronouns. In this paper we treat such overlaps as instantiations of syncretism, and we discuss the different patterns of syncretism with the nominal complementizer in various languages. We treat the syncretism facts within a nanosyntactic framework (Starke, Caha), meaning that complementizers are not simplex heads ofCP(or ForceP/FinP in Rizzi'ssense) but actually composed of multiple features, each feature corresponding to a head in a single functional sequence which is responsible for building demonstratives, complementizers, relativizers, and wh‐pronouns (for alternative decompositions of complementizers in Romance, Balkan, and Germanic, see also Baunaz,, to appear Sanfelice & Poletto; and Leu, respectively). Interestingly, moreover, many of the languages under discussion show a bound morpheme appearing as an integral part of the internal morphological makeup of quantifiers. This bound morpheme may also be syncretic with the complementizer (Romance ‐que/‐che, Serbo‐Croatian ‐što, Modern Greek ‐ti, Finnish ‐kin, and Hungarianho‐) or not (Germanic ‐thing/‐ting, for which see also Leu). We call this the ‘nominal core’ (n), and its behavior with regard to syncretism is crucial for determining the hierarchical ordering of the functional sequence.