Re: "Difficult" clauses

In a message dated 5/14/2007 2:52:13 PM Central Daylight Time,
aquamarine_demon@YAHOO.COM writes:


> >> I think you missed my point.  If a word is implied, then it's not there,
> even if it could be there.  Adding a word that will not be there isn't
> really adding anything.
>
> stevo<<
>
>   I'm sort of walking into the middle of this thread, so apologies if I'm
> misunderstanding something. In my linguistics class this semester, we talked
> about deep structure in syntax. This is mainly important for understanding how
> transformation rules work, but I think it's also relative here. In English,
> it's possible for a speaker to omit the complementizer "that"; however, it is
> still there in the deep structure of a sentence, because it is the head of
> the complementizer phrase, and you can't have a phrase without a head. So yes,
> it is still there, even if it's not part of the actual spoken sample (because
> listeners still insert a "that" when interpreting the sentence).
>
Whether the "that" is explicit or implicit is not really the issue.  For one
thing, you can't arbitrarily insert "that" wherever you want.  As you say,
it's part of the deep structure.

stevo   </HTML>

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