Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1981, Page 170

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Ritdómar
Höskuldur Thráinsson. 1979. On Complementation in lcelandic. Garland
Publishing Co., New York. X + 507 pps.
Since the late 1960’s, generative syntax has been largely concerned with the
grammar of complement clauses, subordinate clauses such as those of (1), whose
functions are analogous to those of subjects, objects, and other noun-phrases:
(1) a [Að málvísindamenn skuli ekki fá vinnu] er óþolandi
b Ég lofaði henni [að ég skyldi fara]
c Jón var að hugsa um [hvort María mundi koma]
It is thus quite natural that the first large scale generative study of Icelandic
syntax, Thráinsson’s On Complementation in Icelandic, should be devoted to the
grammar of these constructions.
Thráinsson (henceforth T) analyses Icelandic complementation within the ‘classi-
cal’ transformational syntactic framework of Chomsky (1965), producing an ana-
lysis that is essentially like Rosenbaum’s (1967) treatment of complementation in
English, incorporating some but not all of the emendations that have been proposed
since, especially those of Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970) and Bresnan (1973).
In part I, T argues for the traditional position that complement clauses and
certain infinitives (primarily those marked by aff) are noun-phrases (NP) in consti-
tuent structure. In the first chapter, he shows that they are generated in deep
structure syntactic positions typical of NP, such as subject, object, and object of
preposition, and argues that whether a verb can take a complement clause or not
is determined by whether such a complement would be semantically plausible.
In chapter 2 he argues that complement clauses behave like NP for the purposes
of various transformations, such as the discourse rules of Topicalization, Clefting
and Dislocation, and others such as Coordination Reduction. In this chapter T
also discusses certain restrictions on the distribution of complement clauses and
infinitives, such as the NP-over-S constraint of Ross (1967:33), that exclude them
from some NP positions.
In part II, T investigates the transformational rules that apply to complement
clauses. He begins with a brief consideration in chapter 3 of the factors governing
the selection of the various types of complement clauses, concluding that the
restrictions on complement clause selection are primarily semantic: each clause
type has a meaning which be compatible with that of the verb it is complement
to. But there is also some idiosyncratic lexical government of complement clause
types.
In chapter 4, T investigates in great detail a rule of Extraposition, which moves
a complement clause from within an NP to the end of the sentence, leaving be-
hind a dummy pronoun þaff. Extraposition derives (2) from a source source with
the structure (l)a:
(2) Það er óþolandi [að málvísindamenn skuli ekki fá vinnu]