Functional Projections and Dutch Complementizers

Formal grammar ooers two ways of analysing complementizers, i.e. as heads of their own phrasal projection (CP) or as nonhead sisters of verbal projections. Within HPSG, both treatments have been argued for, the former in Sag (to appear), the latter in Pollard & Sag (1994). In this paper, I will assess the pros and cons of both options on the basis of a number of Dutch complementizers. 1 Two ways of treating complementizers There are basically two ways of analyzing complementizers in formal grammar. In one type of treatment, complementizers are nonhead sisters of verbal projections, usually clauses; in another type of treatment, they are heads of their own phrasal projection and take a clause as their complement. Instances of the rst type of treatment are Bresnan (1970), Jackendoo (1977) and Gazdar et al. (1985). In Bresnan's phrase structure rule, for instance, a complementizer combines with S to yield an S-bar category. Iterative application is excluded because of the bar-level change. The corresponding Immediate Dominance rule of Gazdar et al. (1985:113) looks very diierent, but is an instance of the same type of treatment. (2) SSCOMP ] ! fSUBCAT ]g , H COMP NIL] where 2 f that, for, whether, if g The clause is explicitly marked as the head (H), and is hence of the same category as the mother (S). Bresnan's distinction between S and S-bar is expressed in terms of the COMP feature: clauses without complementizer have the value NIL, whereas clauses with a com-plementizer have a COMP value which is determined by the SUBCAT value of the comple-mentizer, which in turn corresponds to the form of the complementizer itself. The individual complementizers are hence treated as subcategories of the minor category Complementizer. The alternative type of treatment, in which the complementizer is the head of a functional projection (CP), is typical of GB and its descendants. In this analysis, the complementizer takes a clause as its complement and {optionally{ a topicalized phrase or a wh phrase as its speciier. (3) a. C' ! C 0 S (= IP) 149 b. CP ! YP C' In this treatment, the functional categories (Comp, Inn and Det) are subject to the same X-bar principles as the lexical ones (V, N, A and P). The only diierence is a semantic one: whereas the lexical categories assign a-role to their complements, the functional ones do not. ? Turning now to HPSG, …