Universal #1925

Legacy number: 1925

 Number  1919
 Original  If the verb in main clauses is inflected for subject or object agreement, then the verb in any sentence-like complement type will also be inflected for subject or object agreement.
 Standardized  IF the verb in main clauses is inflected for subject or object agreement, THEN the verb in any sentence-like complement type will also be inflected for subject or object agreement.
 Keywords  verb agreement, subject, object, complementation
 Domain  inflection, syntax
 Type  implication
 Status  achronic
 Quality  statistical
 Basis  languages surveyed in Noonan 1985
 Source  Noonan 1985: 49

← Back to Universals Archive

Discussion
Notes
All languages have some sort of sentence-like complement type, one that without its complementizers has roughly the same syntactic form as a main clause. In a sentence-like complement type, the predicate has the same syntactic relation to its subject and its other arguments that it has in syntactic main clauses: it remains syntactically and morphologically a verb, and any case marking in subjects or objects will have the same form as in main clause.E. g. in English, the sentence Burt is a chicken farmer is identical in form to the sentence-like complement in Max knows [that Burt is a chicken farmer].
Comment
Frans Plank · 3 Aug 2006
All languages have some sort of SENTENCE-LIKE complement type, one that without its complementizers has roughly the same syntactic form as a main clause. In a sentence-like complement type, the predicate has the same syntactic relation to its subject and its other arguments that it has in syntactic main clauses: it remains syntactically and morphologically a verb, and any case marking in subjects or objects will have the same form as in main clause. E. g. in English, the sentence Burt is a chicken farmer is identical in form to the sentence-like complement in Max knows [that Burt is a chicken farmer].