Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Danny Bate (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Where does that come from? A Model for the Development of Declarative Complementizers in Indo-European

Abstract: The aim of this research is to explain and reconcile three curious observations about the syntax of Indo-European languages. The first is that Indo-European declarative complementizers (e.g. English that, French que) are frequently identical to another word in each particular language. The second is that the identical word frequently belongs to the syntactic category of Determiner (including demonstratives and interrogative pronouns). The third is that these similarities seem to have emerged individually - i.e. not from a common syntactic origin - because we believe that the parent language, Proto-Indo-European, did not have subordinate declarative clauses. Through a combination of philology and generativist syntax, this research attempts to explain these seemingly contradictory facts through a model of diachronic change, beginning with Proto-Indo-European. It concludes by suggesting which stage of development is the common inheritance of the Indo-European family.