Earticle

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the grammatical function of that-clauses has been changed since Old English. The diachronic development of that-clauses shows that the complementizer that was developed from the determiner that from the Germanic period, then the complementizer that in Old English extended to the relativizer that of relative clauses from the early Middle English period. In addition, from the late Old English period, to-infinitive clauses began to substitute that-clauses and usage of to-infinitive clauses spread in the Middle English period at the expense of that-clauses. Meanwhile, gerund clauses as well as to-infinitive clauses started replacing that-clauses in the early Modern English period and keep this trend going on. As a result, the diachronic developmental processes in the grammatical function of that are as the following: the determiner that>the complementizer that in that-clauses>the relativizer that in relative clauses, and to-infinitive clauses and gerund clauses were substituted for that-clauses.

The aim of this study is to analyze the complementizer that-deletion in embedded complement clauses in English. This paper is concerned with the alternation between the overt that-complementizer and the zero complementizer by the complementizer deletion (C-deletion or that-deletion) in constructions with a nominal complement that-clause, i.e. [VP Verb [CP that-TP]]. In this paper, we compare that-complementation and zero-complementation in a diachronic grammaticalization and corpus, and show that the complementizer that has its origin in pronouns diachronically and finally becomes to form a C-head of the functional category CP. We provide the syntactic and semantic explanation on the optionality of that-deletion while answering the question why and how that-deletion is getting increasing in use especially with the verb, think, in the informal contexts. With the major causes for the currently increasing use of that-deletion, we are concerned with the contexts in which the overt complementizers or the covert complementizers are preferred.

This paper offers a simple novel approach to the distributions of the declarative Comp that and its null counterpart, the null C, in English. It suggests that the overt Comp that is a PF realization of the null C and that the null C must be adjacent to the embedded subject as well as to the matrix predicate. Behind this suggestion lies a core idea--agreement appears on C, thereby agreeing with the subject; when the subject is extracted through Spec of CP, the agreement is suppressed and thus agreement emergence as that fails to be obtained. This approach will be shown to account for many intriguing contrasts in the CP area, for example, different distributions between the Comp that and the null C, (anti-)that-trace effects, the null C without adjacency.

관계절에서 사용되는 that을 문법적으로 관계대명사라고 보통 지칭한다. 하지만 wh-관계사와 비교하면 관계절 that은 관계대명사의 역할을 모두 갖추고 있다고 볼 수가 없다는 사실을 선험 논문들을 통해 인정하게 된다. 관계대명사란 접속사와 대명사 역할을 하기 때문에 명사적인 통사적 역할을 하는데 몇 가지 부분에서 해당되지가 않는다. 그래서 오래전부터 변형 문법가들은 that을 관계대명사가 아니라고 계속 주장해오고 있다. 본 논문에서는 중립적인 입장에서 관계절 that은 대명사의 특징을 갖고는 있으나 완전하게 대명사라고 볼 수는 없다고 밝혔으며 현재 관계대명사 that은 고대영어 때 접속사에서 시작하여 대명사로 점점 확립되고 있는 과정 중이기에 아직 끝나지 않는 상태로 볼 수 있겠다.

That in a relative clause is grammatically regarded as a relative pronoun. Compared with wh-relatives, it has been acknowledged that the relative clause does not have all the roles of relative pronouns through previous research. Since relative pronouns act as conjunctions and pronouns, they play a syntactic role as a noun, but they do not apply in some parts. So, for a long time, transformational grammarians have been insisting that that is not a relative pronoun. In this paper, from a neutral standpoint, in is revealed that the relative clause that has the characteristics of a pronoun, but cannot be considered a complete pronoun.