Belyaev, Oleg & Kozhemyakina, Anastasia & Serdobolskaya, Natalia: In Defense of COMP: Complementation in Moksha Mordvin
In this paper, we argue that an adequate description of
Moksha Mordvin complement clauses requires preserving the traditional LFG
distinction between OBJ and COMP grammatical functions. Most clausal complements
in Moksha belong to one of the two major types: clauses headed by deverbal nouns
(nominalizations) and finite complement clauses introduced by
complementizers. The behaviour of nominalized clauses mostly corresponds to the
behaviour of nominal arguments, such that they can be distributed between the
grammatical functions SUBJ, OBJ, and OBL, without the need for an extra COMP
function. Similarly, the majority of finite complements can be viewed as SUBJ,
OBJ and OBL depending on the case form of their proforms and quantificational
modifiers and the presence of object agreement on the verb. However, a subset of
verbs does not fit into this classification: on the one hand, their complements
do not trigger object agreement; on the other hand, they cannot be viewed as
SUBJ or OBJ, because they cannot be replaced by nominal proforms and cannot be
accompanied by any quantificational modifiers. We conclude that an additional
grammatical function COMP must be used to account for the behaviour of these
complement clauses.
December 22, 2022 |
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