Wh-complement Clauses and (non-)Local Selection

Abstract

This paper revisits c- and s-selection in the context of wh-clausal complements. The standard treatment of predicate-complement selection can be traced back to generative approaches of 70’s and says that the selection of a complement by a predicate is evaluated both in syntax and semantics. As regards syntax, the grammatical category of the complement must belong to the subcategorization frame of the predicate, and vis-à-vis semantics, the semantic type of the complement must fall in the set of types selected by the predicate. The present paper examines several licit instances of wh-clausal selection that should have been ungrammatical under the standard treatment, but they are not. The analysis offered here says that c-selection reduces to argument selection and is computed derivationally (at the point of External Merge), while s-selection reduces to an interpretation function that spans a larger grammatical domain and is evaluated representationally (at the syntax-semantics interface).