Governors And Interpretation Of That-complement Clause-a Corpus-based Study

The ways that governors affect the interpenetration of that-complement clause is explored primarily in this thesis. That-complement clauses have been drawn from such perspectives as acquisition of the construction, classification of complement-taking verbs, positions of complement clauses, and omissions of complementizer that, etc. Different from the previous researches studying governors as an isolated part, the investigation in this study has linked governors with the matrix clause to investigate their semantic interactions.In this thesis, different types of governors of that-complement clause are analyzed based on Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) both quantitatively and qualitatively. Under discussion and analysis are functions of V-governor clause, factors contributing to the interpretation of that-complement clause after adjectives and competition of two disputable items noun and preposition serving as governor of that-complement clause.The major findings are listed hereon.Firstly, V-governor clause serves in three ways: assertive; performative; formulaic. Assertive V-governor clause conveys the core of the propositional content with the conceptual complement of that-clause. Performative V-governor clause and that-complement clause potentially have different speech-acts with the latter expressing the main proposition and the former being relegated to the secondary interest to coordinate the interaction between speakers and hearers. While in the formulaic use, the V-governor clause serves as clausal operator and that-complement clause expresses the only proposition of the whole utterance.Secondly, the interpenetration of that-complement clause governed by adjective is largely affected by two co-occurrence patterns of A-governor: co-occurrence patterns of subjects and the objects in the verb phrase of A-governor clause. A-governor clause with the intentional subject denotes speaker‘s certainty degrees, and affective psychological state to that-complement clause. While those with non-intentional subjects usually mark the stance or attitude towards the proposition in that-complement clause. Besides, the A-governor clause with intentional object and subjects expresses different meanings with those taking non-intentional object, thus ?verb + adjectives + that-clause? should not be interpreted as variants of ?verb + direct object + adjective + that-clause? when the concept of extraposition is disregarded completely.Last, nouns can be used to govern that-complement clause on two conditions:(1) the head noun itself must be an argument-taking noun;(2) that-clause contains a complete meaning. However, prepositions are not the governor of that-complement clause. That itself is seen as indivisible with the preposition in the limited occurrences of preposition with that-clause.