Chapter Fourteen - complement clauses

Summary

In Chapter 11 generally, and in §11.5.2 in particular, it was shown how preverbs may frequently enter into hypotactic relations with verb classifiers: in these cases the preverb is embedded in the classifier's core as a complement of the classifier, although the linkage is tighter than that usually envisaged when verbal complementation is considered. In this chapter another, looser, kind of complementation is brought into consideration, one that has been referred to intermittently throughout this grammar, in §4.1.3 (iii), §5.1, §5.3.1, §7.2, §8.2.1, §8.4.3, §9.6.2, §10.6.3 (i), §11.5.2, and §13.2.2 (vii). This construction involves the general-purpose pro-classifier kuN[]=yi ‘do’ in its non-classifier use as a simplex verb. A quick outline of this verb's basic usage, as a simplex verb, has been provided in §13.2.1 (iii), and the reader is referred to that section. The present chapter describes the use of kuN[]=yi as a matrix verb, and more particularly the kinds of clauses that may be subordinated to it, as a matrix. The sentences or speech events embedded under or subordinated to kuN[]=yi will be referred to as complement clauses₁.

A number of factors motivate the treatment of the framing verb–framed clause relationship in Worrorra as one of syntactic dependence. Such an analysis is isomorphic with the classifier–preverb relationship described in Chapter 11; in both cases the embedding of an eventive complement is signalled formally by celestial indexation on the verb kuN[]=yi in undergoer position.