Toward a semantic account of that-deletion in English *.

Abstract

The phenomenon of that-deletion in English has traditionally been taken to be single of the prime examples of syntactic at liberty variation: it has implicitly been assumed that the language arbitrarily allows predicates to embed their propositional tales with the complementizer that (as that-clauses), or without it (as bare clauses). Different researchers, however, have demonstrated that the complementizer CANNOT be delet beneath certain classes of predicates. In this article, I exhibit that the distribution of that-deletion across the different predicate classes is