In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Clauses without ‘that’: The case for bare sentential complementation in English by Cathal Doherty
  • Kleanthes K. Grohmann
Clauses without ‘that’: The case for bare sentential complementation in English. By Cathal Doherty. (Outstanding dissertations in linguistics.) New York: Garland, 2000. Pp. xiii, 142. $65.00

The first impression is that this book is ‘outdated’; it is a minimally revised version of the author’s 1993 doctoral dissertation that appeared in 2000. Given that Garland manages to publish so many dissertations within such a short period after defense or submission, Doherty’s admission that ‘[he has] left the text of the original more or less untouched, apart from the addition of this preface, an index and some occasional footnotes discussing more recent literature’(xi) doesn’t come across favorably. A quick look over the references reveals that the latter consists of less than a dozen citations up to 1998—one might conjecture that the period from 1993 to 1998 should warrant more than ‘some occasional foot-notes’. However, it might be the case that the content is not dependent on theory, is timeless, and/or is extremely good, so there was simply no need to revise more. This would be a welcome addition to linguists’ bookshelves indeed. At first glance it seems as if the first of these points does not apply: it is clearly written within the GB-framework, and the theoretical arguments [End Page 816] initially put forward revolve around (proper) government and potential ECP-violations. This being said, the main thesis of the study and the execution are truly novel and very interesting and can, to my mind, easily be integrated into other frameworks.

As the title suggests, D looks at complementation without that and revisits the standard assumption that these are CPs, just as are clauses introduced by that, where the complementizer is a null element. Ch. 1, ‘The category of that-less clauses’ (3–10), introduces the basic issues (clause structure and CP- vs. IP-complementation, where the latter is referred to throughout as the ‘IP-hypothesis’) and sketches the outline of the book. ‘Argument clauses’ (11–56) offers an in-depth discussion of the distribution of that-less complement clauses (such as I said you were right). D lists empirical advantages in favor of IP-complementation in these cases (e.g. embedded topicalization, adverbial adjunction, impossibility of coordination), discusses theoretical objections (basically boiling down to the ECP), and then does away with those (exploring the requirement that ‘[s]elected IP must be a complement of X0 (C0, V0 . . .) at all levels of representation’, 38). Ch. 3, ‘Relative clauses’ (57–102), applies the IP-hypothesis to relative clauses, discussing first ‘standard’ relative clauses without that (cf. the key you lost yesterday) and then ‘nonstandard’ ones where the subject is relativized (There’s a girl wants to see you). One of the nice consequences of this application is that the adjacency requirement these clauses are subject to can be accounted for quite trivially, as there is no operator-movement inside the relative clause. In Ch.4, ‘Extraction theory’ (103–24), D explores how the IP-hypothesis fares with (standard) accounts of the that-trace effect (viz. Who did Bill say (*that) left?). It fares surprisingly well: Assuming the vacuous movement hypothesis and an in-situ generation of subject-gap that-relatives, D argues that the relevant properties can be captured and ‘seems as successful as Rizzi’s’ (121). The book ends with ‘Concluding remarks’ (125–30), including a tentative extension to bare infinitives. In sum, this is a commendable book for its overall clarity, style of argumentation, and novel proposal.

Kleanthes K. Grohmann
University of Cologne
...

pdf

Share