Complement Clauses and Grammatical Relations in Finnish
Kristina Sands
RMW Dixon (series ed.)
Complement Clauses and Grammatical Relations in Finnish looks at complement clauses in Finnish both from a syntactic and a semantic point of view. All seven of the complement clause types used in Finnish are discussed including a detailed discussion on the argument(s) of the main verb that these clauses fill as well as how the arguments of the main clause and the complement clause inter-relate. There is also discussion about the semantics of complement clauses and the verbs with which these co-occur. The most common and important semantic classes of verbs that may govern complement clauses are discussed and it is shown that the types of complement clause that any verb may occur with are determined both by syntactic considerations (such as what types of argument the verb governs and what types of argument the complement clause may fulfil) and by the semantics of both the complement clause and the main verb. The hypothesis that there is a strong semantic relationship between complement clauses and the verbs that the occur with is shown to be true for Finnish.
This study also provides some cross-linguistic information on complement clauses as well as a detailed discussion on the controversial usage of the so-called nominative, accusative, genitive and partitive cases in Finnish and their relationship with the arguments S, A and O.
ISBN 9783862880911. Outstanding grammars from Australia 01. 374pp. 2011.
