Introducing the Special Issue: Clausal and Nominal Complements in Monolingual and Bilingual Grammars

To introduce this Special Issue entitled Clausal and Nominal Complements in Monolingual and Bilingual Grammars, we begin by explaining what originally motivated this Special Issue. The first two co-editors (Ji Young Shim and Tabea Ihsane) worked on the research project entitled Selection at the Interfaces, in which various linguistic aspects (e.g., syntactic structure, interface with semantics, etc.) of clausal and nominal complements in monolingual grammars were explored.1 To extend an investigation of these issues to bilingual contexts, they organized a two-day workshop entitled Clausal and Nominal Complements in Monolingual and Bilingual Grammars in June 2016, where the third co-editor (M. Carmen Parafita Couto) of this Special Issue was an invited speaker.2 The workshop aimed to investigate the left periphery of complements, in particular the left periphery of the clause and the nominal phrase and its edge, such as C(omplementizers) and D(eterminer) and other top-most functional layers, where languages may be parametrized differently, thus leading to linguistic variation.

Within generative grammar, it has long been assumed that language variation is due to variation in the domain of functional categories and their morpho-syntactic properties [1,2]. Following this tradition, the left periphery of the clause has been extensively investigated, confirming the hypothesis that the functional category C(omplementizer) and its morpho-syntactic properties may be parameterized differently across languages within research on monolingual grammar [3,4,5,6]. In addition, the left periphery of a nominal phrase has also been investigated to a great extent [7,8,9], based on the proposal that clauses and nominal phrases have parallel structures ([10] and in subsequent work).

In recent years, generative linguists have also started to pay attention to the left periphery of bilingual grammars, especially in relation to diverse patterns of code-switching, which is the mixed use of two or more languages in conversation, and which is frequently observed in bilingual speech. Under the assumption that monolingual and bilingual grammars are subject to the same grammatical principles [11,12,13,14], several researchers have investigated the grammar of code-switching in various language pairs and showed that the left periphery of a particular functional category such as C, D, or v may be parameterized differently across languages and derive certain patterns of code-switching, which confirm the validity of the linguistic proposals that are put forth to account for monolingual grammars [15,16,17].

While the workshop Clausal and Nominal Complements in Monolingual and Bilingual Grammars motivated us to edit the current Special Issue with the same title, it is important to note that the present volume is not a report on the proceedings of the workshop. A separate call for papers for this volume was made through Languages. The Special Issue Clausal and Nominal Complements in Monolingual and Bilingual Grammars comprises seven articles in total, which are theory-oriented and/or empirically based in nature. These articles collectively investigate one of the key theoretical issues that generative linguists have pursued for a long time: how languages are encoded similarly or differently. In so doing, three articles concentrate on nominal complements and clausal complements in monolingual grammars [18,19,20], and four articles focus on nominal and clausal complements in bilingual grammars [21,22,23,24].

For monolingual contexts, Christopher Laenzlinger compares the structure of clauses (Complementizer Phrases; CPs) and noun/determiner phrases (DPs) [18]. Working in the cartographic approach to the Generative Grammar framework, he reconsiders so-called clause/noun-phrase (non-)parallelism in terms of structure and derivation. Although he assumes that both clauses and nominal phrases have a similar structure, which is divided into three domains—the Nachfeld (‘right periphery’), the Mittelfeld (‘midfield’) and the Vorfeld (‘left periphery’)—he argues that the inner structures of clauses and noun phrases are not strictly parallel, and in particular the left periphery of a clause is richer and more developed than that of a noun phrase. As a result, despite the similar possible types of movement occurring both in the CP and the DP domains (head movement and phrasal movement), there still exists non-parallelism in CPs and DPs in the application of these types of movement. To support the existence of non-parallelism between clauses and nominal phrases, Laenzlinger shows the respective orders of various elements such as adverbs/adjectives, DP/Prepositional Phrase (PP)-arguments and DP/PP-adjuncts in French in comparison with many other languages.

In addition to Laenzlinger’s analysis [18], two more papers focus on the structure of clausal complements in monolingual grammars. Marcel den Dikken [19] revisits Chomsky’s two earlier approaches to account for the structure of clausal complements of verbs—a preform analysis [25] and a direct clausal embedding analysis [26], the latter of which has replaced the former and has become the generalized view in generative syntax. By comparing factive and non-factive clausal complements in Dutch and Hungarian, particularly the relative position of the verb vis-à-vis the clausal complement in Dutch and the co-occurrence of a proleptic noun with the clausal complement in Hungarian, den Dikken proposes that there are two structural positions for the object of verbs, the usual complement of the verb position and a specifier of VP (or a higher node). While the direct clausal embedding analysis accounts for the complement position of the object, it is the preform analysis (with a small modification) that can explain the specifier position of the object in these two languages. Den Dikken further builds up his proposal into analyzing wh-scope marking and wh-dependencies in Hungarian and German.

The distinction between factive and non-factive clausal complements is also discussed in detail by Ji Young Shim and Tabea Ihsane [20]. They investigate clausal complements of factive and non-factive predicates in English, with particular focus on the distribution of overt and null that complementizers. To account for several differences between factive and non-factive clausal complements, including the distribution of the overt and null complementizers, they propose that overt that clauses and null that clauses have different underlying structures responsible for their different syntactic behavior. Adopting Rizzi’s split CP structure with two C heads, Force and Finiteness [3], Shim and Ihsane suggest that null that clauses are FinPs (Finiteness Phrases) under both factive and non-factive predicates, whereas overt that clauses have an extra functional layer above FinP, lexicalizing either the head Force under non-factive predicates or the light demonstrative head d under factive predicates. The authors argue that this analysis further provides an explanation for the distribution of overt that clauses and null that clauses outside sentential complements, such as sentential subjects.

The interim conclusion of the papers by Laenzlinger [18], den Dikken [19] and Shim and Ihsane [20], which are based on the monolingual grammar of diverse languages, suggest that, despite the widely assumed structural parallelism between clauses and nominals, the clausal left periphery is more complex than the nominal left periphery, and the inner structure of the clausal left periphery also varies depending on its selection of predicates, such as factivity. Thus, to understand the precise nature of clausal and nominal left peripheries, we must also consider their interface with semantics and the lexical items that comprise them.

As for bilingual contexts, Robert-Tissot and Morel [21] use a Swiss corpus of code-switching text messages to test two principles proposed by González Vilbazo [27]: (i) the Principle of Functional Restriction (i.e., two functional heads X° and Y° have to be filled by lexical material of the same language if the functional category of YP is the complement of X° and both heads are part of the same extended projection); and (ii) the Principle of Agreement (i.e., inside a phrase, agreement requirements have to be satisfied, regardless of the language providing the lexical material). They discuss specific examples that mostly confirm the validity of the principles, showing the structured nature of code-switching as well as contributing to the growing consensus that it is possible to predict the nature of grammatical and ungrammatical code- switched sequences.

In their article, López et al. [22] show how the theoretical construct “phase” can be used to account for a number of restrictions on code-switching, in particular those formalized under the Principle of Functional Restriction [27] and the Phonetic Form Interface Condition [28]. López et al. postulate the Block Transfer Hypothesis (BTH), stating that the material that is transferred to the interfaces within a phase is transferred in one block. It follows from the BTH that code-switching may take place at phase boundaries but not within the phase. They further posit that phases are empirically superior in scope, as they can explain code-switching phenomena not explained by previous accounts (e.g., switches between C and TP, progressive aspect, and switching within the word level). The authors take this as reinforcement for the fundamental hypothesis that code-switching should be studied using the same tools that we use for monolingual data, and suggest that phase theory, together with distributed morphology, may be the way forward.

In both studies (one by Robert-Tissot and Morel [21] and the other by López et al. [22]), the validity of the Principle of Functional Restriction (PFR) is tested. The PFR prohibits code-switching between two functional heads belonging in the same extended projection. Thus, it predicts that code-switching cannot occur in the left periphery of a nominal phrase (e.g., between a D(eterminer) and a Q(uantifier) and also in the left periphery of a clause (e.g., between a C(omplementizer) and T(ense)). However, both studies found counter-examples that allow code-switching in the left periphery of nominal and clausal domains. For instance, a switch may occur between a D (Italian) and a Q (French) [21] and between a C (Spanish) and T (German) if Spec C is not empty [22]. To account for these examples, Robert-Tissot and Morel resort to a non-structural account, whereas López et al. offer a phase-based syntactic analysis.

The left periphery of noun phrases in bilingual contexts is explored in two papers in this volume. In her contribution [23], Brita Ramsevik Riksem investigates the heritage language American Norwegian and provides a diachronic study of language-mixing within noun phrases, that is, the occurrence of English items in American Norwegian. By comparing data collected in the 1930s and 1940s with recently collected data, she shows that the overall pattern of language-mixing is stable but some systematic diachronic changes are attested, specifically concerning the categories of number and definiteness. These changes consist of the omission of functional exponents and usage of English functional exponents, such as the plural suffix -s and the determiner the. She proposes two potential analyses of these patterns based on an exoskeletal approach to grammar, and a theoretical framework that separates abstract syntactic structure from its phonological exponents. These analyses consider both the structure and the exponents as the origins of the change. However, on the basis of the observed patterns of change, Riksem argues that a structural reanalysis of American Norwegian grammar is occurring.

Finally, Blokzijl et al. explore the factors that influence the language of determiners in mixed nominal constructions in two bilingual corpora (Spanish-English speakers in Miami (USA), and Spanish-English creole speakers in Nicaragua) [24]. The results of their comparative analysis indicate that the language of the determiner matches the matrix language. Crucially, this match between the language of the determiner and the matrix language seems to be unaffected by any grammaticized features in the determiner, which is unlike that which has been previously argued [29]. Additionally, they found that the frequency of switching from the determiner to the noun was asymmetric in the Miami data, being more frequent from Spanish to English in the Miami data. In the Nicaragua data, on the other hand, they only observed switches from English creole to Spanish. These findings call into question the assumption that the same code-switching patterns surface in different bilingual communities, suggesting that we need to examine the interplay between social and grammatical factors more meticulously.

Overall, this Special Issue provides a timely collection of articles that discuss clausal and nominal complements in monolingual and bilingual grammars, especially in the form of code-switching. As evidenced by several papers in this collection, the inner structure of clausal and nominal edges differs from language to language and it further affects patterns of code-switching. We hope that the papers in this Special Issue will generate keen interest in this topic and offer a basis for further research on other related topics. In particular, more work needs to be conducted to examine diachronic structural changes in bilingual grammars and syntactic variation in bi/multilingual contexts involving lesser-studied languages such as Creoles (e.g., Nicaragua, Belize, Cape Verde, etc.; see, for instance, the volume edited by Sessarego [30]). This direction of research will have much to tell us about linguistic variation across time and space.