The Emergence of Finite Complements

Abstract

Abstract Finite complements in Akkadian developed from adverbial clauses. This process may appear unusual, since adverbial clauses are not often reported as sources of finite complements, and since adverbial conjunctions are not often reported as sources of complementizers. Moreover, according to the common interpretation of finite complements as object clauses (an interpretation which I tried to discredit in §2.1 above), the structural aspect of the change from adverbial clauses to complements may seem very problematic. This chapter examines the emergence of finite complements by tracing the development of the conjunction k”ima from an adverbial subordinator to a complementizer. I argue that the change from an adverbial to a complement can, in fact, be smooth and very natural, and that it does not present any genuine problems on either the semantic level or the structural level. Section 4.2 describes the core part of this process, the ‘bleaching’ of k’ima, from the causal meaning (‘because’) to the factive meaning (‘that’). The following section then examines the structural consequences of this process of semantic change.