Complement clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec: why are they unique and how might typology support our understanding of them even without defining them?

Ambrocio Guttiérez Lorenzo

UT Austin

In this talk I discuss how language description benefits from typological frameworks, but language specific morphosyntactic criteria must take precedence over typological expectations (Haspelmath 2020). In order to do this, I present the case of complement clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec (TdVZ). I classify these clauses based on their form, but the semantics, especially of the complement taking predicate (CTP), plays a crucial role in defining each type of complement. I propose two main types of complements, with various subtypes. I follow Noonan (2007) in naming each of these main types as non-reduced and reduced. Non-reduced complements are optionally introduced by a complementizer and do not show any aspect restrictions. Reduced complements fall into five types, none of which is introduced by a complementizer and each of which exhibits specific TAM restrictions. In addition to categorizing complement clauses, I show that one type of reduced complements is structurally similar to serial verb constructions and purpose clauses. Interrogative complements and what could be considered a type of headless relative clauses (free headless relative clauses, Caponigro 2020) also have the same form. In this way, I provide language specific criteria to define each type of construction. However, since I agree that one purpose of language documentation and description is to serve as a primary data pool for typological inquiry, I also observe and characterize the degree of integration of the predicates/clauses involved in these constructions. To do this, I examine the tendency that CTPs exhibit when selecting their complements; and interestingly, TdVZ show many patterns typically observed crosslinguistically in the complement structures associated with these CTPs. This suggests that there may be common patterns across languages and that comparative frameworks are valuable for understanding language systems, but not theoretically necessary in language description, because each language is structurally unique.