Is complementation a universal strategy? A cross-linguistic corpus study
This article examines the question of whether complementation structures are cross-linguistically universal by using two different cross-linguistic corpora, each drawing on the same thirteen languages, spanning every continent. One is SCOPIC, the Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus, specifically designed to elicit material rich in grammatical categories relevant to social cognition; for each language in our sample this was balanced by a “general corpus” of roughly the same size with no specific targeting of domains. We find that, while complementation is widespread, it is not universal within the languages in our sample: in some it is absent entirely and in others it is extremely rare. Of the structural alternatives used to achieve the same functional goal by far the commonest is quoted speech, suggesting that in the evolution of linguistic structures it is heteroglossia, the embedding of one person’s words in another’s, that is a more basic phenomenon, from which complementation structures then evolve in many but not all languages.
Authors
- Andrea C. Schalley (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1323-1548)
- Asako Shiohara (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-2726-3675)
- Christian Döhler (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9659-5920)
- Dominique Knuchel (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1319-5786)
- Saskia Van Putten (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1652-9967)
- Yukinori Kimoto
- Hitomi Ôno
- Sonja Gipper (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0972-1683)
- Henrik Bergqvist
- Yanti
- Daniel Majchrzak
- I Wayan Arka
- Nicholas Evans
- Danielle Barth
- Eka Pratiwi
- Yanti
Institutions
- Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (JP)
- Australian National University (AU)
- University of Bern (CH)
- Udayana University (ID)
- Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)
- Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia (ID)
- University of Cologne (DE)
- Reitaku University (JP)
- University of Zurich (CH)
- Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (DE)
- Universitas Mahasaraswati Denpasar (ID)
- Karlstad University (SE)
- University of Gothenburg (SE)
- The University of Osaka (JP)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads
- Published
- 2026-02-25
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2785-0943/21288
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 72.27
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Volkswagen Foundation
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
- Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
- Vetenskapsrådet
- Universität zu Köln
- Arts and Humanities Research Council
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science