How to be an embedded clause: say complementizers in Bantu

Abstract

Recent work on a number of Bantu languages has given us new information on the morphosyntax of finite complement clauses in the Bantu family, revealing a rich picture of morphologically complex complementizers (e.g. Diercks 2013, Baker et al 2012, Letsholo and Safir 2017, Pietraszko 2017, Halpert 2018). In this paper, I survey some of this evidence, focusing in particular on complementizers that are built out of say verbs. I draw from my own fieldwork on Zulu to show that even when complementizers have a common lexical base, their behavior can vary widely depending on the particular morphological makeup of the complementizer. Comparing Zulu complementizers and those found in some other Bantu languages, we find support for recent semantic approaches to finite complement clauses and can begin to refine their ideas about which syntactic properties correspond to particular embedding strategies (e.g. Elliott 2016, Kratzer 2015, 2016; Moulton 2009, 2015).