Semantic And Syntactic Analysis Of THAT Complement In The English Language

THAT complement clauses have been studied by previous researchers mostly from the following perspectives, lacking semantic analysis: the main tenses of THAT complement clauses, the omission of a preposition before the complementizer that, the omission of the complementizer that, the extraposition of the THAT complement clause, verbs that can or cannot take a THAT complement.Instead of the previous way—from the attributes of verbs to select complement type—we start from the very nature of the THAT complement clause to see its concurrence with verbs, its positions, meanings and functions.Based on the previous perspectives and findings on the THAT complement clause, this thesis tends to make up the semantic analysis in answering the following research questions with the help of the British National Corpus:1) What are the deep semantic meanings of the THAT complement clause?2) What are the semantic restrictions for verbs to take a THAT complement?3) What are the functions of the complementizer word that in a THAT complement?4) Are there social factors in THAT complement clauses?Through all the analyses we arrive at three main conclusions on THAT complement clauses:1) Historical researches show that THAT complements usually refer to facts, which is correct to a large degree. However, corpus study demonstrates that THAT complements are both factive and nonfactive and concentrate on the totality of an activity, event or state. It is not necessary that a THAT complement clause should always refer to a fact, as long as it does have the act of referring to something or reporting something.2) Previous researchers study THAT complements mainly from the characteristics of the verbs that can or cannot take a THAT complement. This thesis adopts an opposite way—starting from the very nature of THAT complements. That complements often refer to a state, an activity, or an event as a whole unit, so verbs which can take a THAT complement must have the ability to refer to an activity or event as a whole, or describe the state the subject of the matrix sentence is in. we examine the dictionary definitions of these verbs to see whether there is such an entry similar to "have the ability to refer to an activity or event as a whole, or describe the state the subject of the matrix sentence is in". And data from dictionary support this conclusion.3) Apart from the original views of the functions of the complementizer that, we arrive at three more functions: (1) it functions as a buffering: saying that... can give the speaker more time to think about what to say next and organize his speech; (2) with the complementizer, the speaker can clearly tell the hearer that he is going to say something different, important, emphasizing a transition during the speech; (3) with the above two functions, the use of the complementizer reduces the comprehension difficulty of the hearer ( or reader).