Why Complement Clauses Do Not Include a That-Complementizer in Early Child Language

The emergence of relative clauses in early child language

This paper examines the development of relative clauses in early child language. It is argued that relative clauses constitute a network of related constructions that children acquire in a piecemeal bottom-up way, starting with relative clauses that are only little different from simple sentences which are gradually extended into more complex grammatical patterns. The acquisition process is dri...

The persistence of optional complementizer production: Why saying ‘‘that’’ is not saying ‘‘that’’ at all

What kinds of processing mechanisms determine the forms of spoken sentences? Three experiments (N 1⁄4 176) measured whether the mention of an optional that in a sentence-complement structure (‘‘The mechanic mentioned (that) the car could use a tune-up’’) can be primed by the prior production of a sentence that included a lexically or a lexically and syntactically similar that, using a recall-ba...

Why Believe That There Is a God?

This article presents an argument for the existence of God, showing that the evident phenomena are best explained by supposing that a God causes them. The argument is based on the inductive force of four very evident general phenomena: that there is a physical Universe; that it is governed by very simple natural laws; that those laws are such as to lead to the existence of human bodies; and tha...

Complement Clauses and Expletives

Complement clauses in Dutch may appear in either extraposed or fronted position. An extraposed clause may cooccur with an expletive element het (it), but this element is never present if the complement clause is fronted. In this paperwe investigate howwemay account for this asymmetry in a nontransformational framework such as HPSG. In Dutch subordinate clauses, complement clauses always appear ...

Why UML will not do ?