THE SEMANTICS OF THE CONTENT CLAUSE CONSTRUCTION IN ENGLISH MASUHIRONOMURA University of California at San Diego A content clause is a that-clause that is in apposition to a noun and ex- presses its content. The present paper is an attempt to consider what kinds of nouns can take a content clause and to explain how the content clause construction is related to some other similar constructions. It will be claimed that nouns interpretable as something composed of words can take a content clause and that the CONTAINER-CONTENT image- schema suggests a perspective from which to relate the content clause construction to the relative (adverbial) clause construction.* 0. Introduction The term "content clause" was originally employed by Jespersen (1927), and later redefined by Zandvoort (1965) as a that-clause in apposition to a noun and expressing its content (e.g. statement/belief/ news that S). It has occasionally been pointed out that Japanese learners of English tend to make the following kind of mistakes, presumably due to first language interference from the equivalent Japanese sentences:1 (1) *a picture that children are playing in the park (Egawa (1964: 20)) (2) *Looking at the appearance that the birds gradually build their nest- (Matsui (1979: 89)) * Portions of this paper were presented at the Eighth National Conference of the English Linguistic Society of Japan held at Rikkyo University in November 1990. I am grateful to Adele Goldberg, Yoshihiko Ikegami, Suzanne Kemmer, and Ronald Langacker for their valuable comments on earlier versions of the present paper. I am indebted to Charles W. Cushman and lots of students at UCSD for providing native-speaker judgements. Any remaining inadequacies are, of course, my re- sponsibility alone. 1 For a discussion of Japanese noun-modifying constructions, see Josephs (1976), Teramura (1980) and Matsumoto (1988). English Linguistics 10 (1993) 184-210 -184- (C)1993 by the English Linguistic Society of Japan THE SEMANTICS OF THE CONTENT CLAUSE CONSTRUCTION IN ENGLISH 185 (3) *He noticed the smell that something was burning in the kitchen. (4) *John's success that his novel won the Pulitzer Prize surprised us. (5) *John's achievement that he mastered Chinese in a month is surprising. (6) *The videotape describes the crime that a burglar broke into the bank and shot the manager. These mistakes involve the use of a content clause with a head noun that cannot take a content clause. They suggest that there are some semantic restrictions on the noun that can take a content clause in English. There has not been, however, a work that gives a satisfactory account of the problem. For example, Quirk et al. (1985: 1260) note that "the head noun of the phrase must be a general abstract noun such as fact, idea, proposition, reply, remark, answer, and the like". It is obvious, however, that the characterization of that-taking nouns as a "general abstract noun" is quite insufficient, since the nouns in exam- ples (4)-(6) may safely be assumed to be an instance of "general ab- stract noun".2 The aim of the present paper is to provide a semantic characteriza- tion of the nouns that can take a content clause and to explain how the content clause construction relates to some other constructions. 1. Motivations of the Construction 1.1. Assumptions Among the nouns that can take a content clause, some can be associ- ated with a verb (or sometimes an adjective) that takes a that-clause (e.g. statement that S<state that S, awareness that S<aware that S), while others cannot (e. g. fact/idea/news that S). To accommodate this observation, I will make the following two methodological assumptions: (7) In the unmarked case, deverbal nouns take the same type of complement as their corresponding verbs. This means that when the verb takes a that-clause, its deverbal noun does the same. 2 For a list of that-taking nouns, see Bridgeman (1965), Higgins (1979), Ozawa (1955), and Watanabe (1966). 186 ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, VOLUME 10 (1993) (8) The semantics of the content clause construction ("N that S") is based on the nominalization of "V that S". The non- deverbal nouns that satisfy this semantics (e.g. fact, idea, news, etc.) are attracted to the class of nouns that appear in "N that S".3 It follows from these assumptions that the semantic characterization of that-taking verbs will be an important clue as to the semantic character- ization of the nouns that take a content clause.4 1.2. Categories of the Verbs that Take a That-Clause In this section, we aim to see what kinds of verbs can take a that- clause in English. Givon (1980) is the most comprehensive account of the relationship between verb semantics and complementation and I will assume his analysis without further discussion. Givon proposed the concept of "binding" to capture systematic and iconic correlations between the semantics of complement-taking verbs and the syntactic structure of their complements. The definition of "binding" goes as follows: (9) The stronger the influence exerted over the agent of the complement clause by the agent of the main-clause verb, by whatever means, the higher is the main-clause verb on the binding scale. (p. 335)5 The binding of the verb correlates inversely with the degree to which its complement appears syntactically similar to a main clause in terms of such parameters as case-marking, tense-aspect-modality, and predicate-raising: (10) The higher a verb is on the binding scale, the less would its complement tend to be syntactically coded as an independent/main clause. (p. 337) According to the positions of the verbs on the binding scale, Givon classifies verbs into three categories, namely, manipulative verbs (e.g. 3 This is a methodological assumption and is not intended as a diachronic state- ment. Historically, the content clause construction existed as early as in OE (see Mitchell (1985: 21) and Traugott (1992: 234-235) for some OE examples). 4 For traditional studies on the verbs and adjectives that take a that-clause, see Alexander and Kunz (1964) and Storms (1966). 5 Strictly speaking, this definition holds for manipulative verbs, and it has to be slightly modified for modality verbs and cognition-utterance verbs; see Givon (1980: 336-337, 342). THE SEMANTICS OF THE CONTENT CLAUSE CONSTRUCTION IN ENGLISH 187 'order', 'cause', 'tell', 'force', etc.), modality verbs (e.g. 'want', 'suc- ceed', 'fail', 'start', 'intend', 'try', etc.) and cognition-utterance verbs (e.g. 'say', 'think', 'know', etc.), and concludes, with ample cross-lin- guistic data, that manipulative verbs and modality verbs occupy higher positions on the binding scale than cognition-utterance verbs (cf. I made [him go to Tokyo] vs. I tried [to go to Tokyo] vs. I think [that he went to Tokyo]).6 This means that cognition-utterance verbs are most likely to have their complement clause expressed as an independent/main clause, which is, in English, a that-clause. Cognition-utterance verbs are scaled according to the degree of "emotional commitment" of the main-clause subject/agent to the out- come encoded in the complement clause (pp. 336-337, 345): (11) 'say'<'think'<'decide'<'hope'<'want''believe' 'agree' 'remember' 'know' 'expect' 'forget' This scale shows that 'say' is the lowest on the binding scale, which means that in English, say is the most typical verb that takes a that- clause.7 This is intuitively quite natural because the verb 'say' "in- volves simply quotation with no emotional commitment whatever" (p. 346). There is some additional evidence to suggest that 'say' is the lowest on the scale. First, in a number of languages, a low-binding complementizer (equivalent to English that) is derived from the verb 'say' (See Givon (1980: 338-346), Ransom (1988: 371), Saxena (1988), Heine et al. (1991: 216) for examples). Second, in a number of languages, 'say' behaves differently from other cognition-utterance verbs in terms of complementation. Consid- er: (12) a. He knew/thought/*said of her coming. b. He knew/thought/said that she came. (pp. 367-368) Comparing a nominal complement in (12a) with a sentential comple- ment in (12b), Givon notes that the nominal complement "tends to be interpreted as 'presupposed' and in that sense expressing stronger 6 For cross-linguistic evidence, see Givon (1980:347-368). Words enclosed in single quotation marks are used as meta-language. 7 For a different view on the prototypicalthat-taking verb, see Wierzbicka(1988: 132-140),who argues that KNOW is more closely related to THAT complements than is SAY. 188 ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, VOLUME 10 (1993) certainty, which characterizes the higher portion of the epistemic-verb continuum" (p. 367). Unlike know and think, which can take both types, say can take only the sentential one. This suggests that say is situated lower on the binding scale than know and think.8 It can be concluded that say., or more broadly UTTERANCE verbs (say, state, remark, etc.) are the prototype of the that-taking verbs. I suggest that this prototype is extended to COGNITION verbs (know, believe, think, etc.), on the one hand, and EMOTION verbs (rejoice, lament, etc.) and MENTAL MANIPULATION verbs (deny, doubt, prove, etc.), on the other hand, in terms of the selection of a that- clause. The extension from UTTERANCE to COGNITION is motivated by our conception that thinking is internal speech. The following usage of say where say comes to mean "think" or "assume" is suggestive of this extension: (13) a. Let's go into business together; what do you say? (L) b. "I didn't tell a lie", she said to herself.