Assessing the impact of syntactic complement type on the modifying status of complement-taking predicates: the case of imagine

Revisiting complement and parenthetical constructions: theory and description

“…Instead, it presents evidence of cooptation at work, and thus adds to the diachronic validity of Discourse Grammar, advocated by Heine and Kaltenböck (2021). Maekelberghe's (2021) paper concentrates on CTP-clauses with imagine, whose grammatical uses show an unusually high degree of formal variability, both in terms of TAM values in the CTP-clause and in terms of formal types of complement (research question (c)). On the basis of a hierarchical cluster analysis applied to a synchronic dataset, Maekelberghe finds correlations between the formal type of complement and the possibility of grammatical uses (research question (a)).…”

“…What stands out most is the converging evidence that parenthetical clauses do not always compare to grammatically used CTP-clauses in sentence-initial position like I think in (6) compares to I think in (2) above. Rather, parenthetical clauses may be diverse in terms of morpho-syntactic features, and they may not show schematic, speaker-related meanings (see Boye and Harder 2021;Gentens 2022;Maekelberghe 2021). This finding has a diachronic correlate: such formally variable and lexically full parentheticals may and often do emerge prior to grammatical uses of CTP-clauses (Gentens 2022).…”

The language of school writing: a developmental comparison of genres across the school years

“…Complement clauses are not difficult to produce or comprehend, and children produce them early on (Boeg Thomsen et al, 2021;Ögel-Balaban & Aksu-Koç 2020). Their importance lies in the type of predicates -especially mental verbs and adjectives -that govern such clauses (Brandt, 2020;Maekelberghe, 2021), promoting the ultimate development of Theory of Mind and social cognition.…”