Author Description

This book draws together nine original investigations by leading linguists and promising young scholars on the syntax of complementisers (eg that in She said that she would) and their phrases. The chapters are divided into two parts, each of which highlights aspects of the behaviour and function of complementisers. The first part looks at how and when subjects, or parts of subjects, can and cannot move outside their canonical position in a sentence. Each chapter examines and compares the relevance of a number of syntactic factors in languages such as English, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Brazilian Portuguese and Bavarian. In the second part, the focus turns to the nature and function of complementisers themselves, with discussions drawing on evidence from Italian, Italian dialects, Hebrew, and Dutch.