Syntactic categories and positional shape alternations

Abstract The present paper investigates the phenomenon of “inflected complementizers” seen in many Continental West Germanic dialects. The proposal developed takes as its point of departure the commonality of linear distribution between inflected complementizers and finite verbs that exhibit the same kind of special morphology. This commonality manifests itself in implicational relationships, which strongly suggest that the behavior of complementizers is an analogical extension of morphological mergers involving finite verbs in the same linear position. Under this analysis, the occurrence of i... Mehr ...