Complement and purpose clauses in K’iche’

Abstract

This dissertation describes the morphological and syntactic properties of complement and purpose clauses in K’iche’. K’iche’ is a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. Complement clauses are clausal elements that correspond to an argument of the matrix clause (Noonan 2007). In this study I show that syntactically there are three types of complement clause in K’iche’: finite complements with complementizers (CP-complements), finite complements without complementizers (S-complements), and non-finite complements. CP-complements are full clauses. S-complements have a less elaborated structure where negation and topic do not have space. Therefore these are separate types of complements contrary to what has been said (Larsen 1988). Besides that, S-complements usually require coreference of an argument of the matrix with an argument of the complement, whereas CP-complements do not have such restrictions. Non-finite complements do not bear time/aspect/mood (TAM) marking nor subject agreement markers. Therefore this type of complement has a smaller structure than either of the finite complements. They depend on the matrix clause for the interpretation of TAM and they display interesting control relations that are also found in non-finite purpose clauses. I also propose three types of purpose clauses in K’iche’ that pattern with complement clauses: finite purpose clauses with subordinators, finite purpose clauses without subordinators, and non-finite purpose clauses. Finite purpose clauses with subordinators are like non-finite complement clauses without complementizers in the sense that they are like independent clauses. The only difference is that it is not possible to extract any element from a purpose clause, while extraction is possible with finite complements. Non-finite purpose clauses are like non-finite complement clauses, except that non-finite purpose clauses are adjuncts rather than arguments. Although finite purpose clauses without subordinators and finite complements without complementizers look like the same, I show that the former are paratactic while the latter are embedded. Here is where the parallelism between complement and purpose clauses breaks down. In this study I provide an inventory of verbs that select each type of complement. I show that the morphosyntactic integration resembles the semantic integration between the matrix and the complement clause, as Kockelman (2003) shows for Q’eqchi’.