Abstract
It is well known that in German (and many other languages) clauses headed by a conditional complementizer can appear as (apparent) arguments of some verbs, including preference predicates and factive verbs. In most of the recent literature, indirect analyses are advocated according to which in such cases the clauses headed by wenn (‘if’) are adverbial clauses with a conditional interpretation and not real argument-clauses of the embedding verb. I argue in this paper that an argument-analysis is more advantageous for a systematic group of cases. I will propose a slight modification of the semantics of the standard conditional complementizer which will allow to capture its natural distribution between the two other main argument complementizers: dass (‘that’) and ob (‘whether’). The paper strongly focuses on German but also discusses some distributional facts from other European languages such as English, French, Romanian and Hungarian.
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