Noun-Complement Clauses and Structural Relations in DP

Abstract

For what are traditionally called ‘noun-complement clause’ (hereinafter NCC) constructions, longstanding questions surround the relationship between the head noun and the subordinate clause, and the way this relationship is structurally represented. This paper presents data from Dutch NCCs to show that the NP and the CP are phrasal units connected to one another by a functional head whose postulation is needed independently of NCCs for the analysis of nominal and correlative constructions in which a relationship between two phrasal terms is established. NCCs are indeed complements—not to the head noun but to the functional head that establishes the relationship between NP and CP within the complex DP. After a discussion of the distribution of overt functors introducing NCCs, the paper places its conclusion for NCCs in the wider context of clausal hypotaxis, sketching an approach to CPs standardly analysed as complements of V wherein the CP is once again the lower phrasal term of a functional projection, with the higher term being a proleptic pronoun (the it of I hate it that S, I am sure of it that S) which can be left unpronounced under the right circumstances.