Uli Sauerland (colloquium abstract)

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Clauses as Complementizers: Embedding in Teiwa

Uli Sauerland
Stanford University, Humboldt and Potsdam Universities, Germany

ABSTRACT

In several language families, the verb "say" has grammaticalized into a complementizer (Semitic, Chadic, ... ). Does this mean that embedding was not present at the beginning of this grammaticalization sequence? I look at a living language that instantiates the beginning of the grammaticalization sequence: Teiwa, a Neuguinean language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. The presence of embedded clauses in Teiwa has been called into question (Klamer 2008) because typically complementation verbs are followed by another clause starting with the verb say, as in: "You told me ; you say ; he is well." I argue that this sequence is actually one complex sentence in Teiwa, and that "you say" acts merely as a complementizer. I conclude that the Teiwa data make it plausible that also Old-Babylonian "para-taxis" is really embedding.