Clausal complementation as relativization, revisited

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In Nez Perce, some but not all notional complement clauses show the characteristic morphology of relativization. In contrast to some crosslinguistic data emphasizing nominalization as the source of commonalities between notional complement clauses and relative clauses, I show that relative-like notional complement clauses in Nez Perce are simply CPs with no nominal superstructure. It is the internal syntax of these clauses that is relative-like, involving A' movement from a high functional projection inside CP. I show that the language makes a distinction between two types of notional complement clauses, those that involve A' movement of this sort (“relative embeddings”) and those that do not (“simplex embeddings”). One conclusion is that not all clausal complementation is relativization, pace Kayne (2008, 2014), Arsenijevic (2009). Another is that relative-like notional complement clauses show variation across languages at least as concerns nominal superstructure and the generation of factive inferences.