IMMAGES is a research project, jointly funded by the DFG and the ANR (ANR-22-FRAL-0005), which aims at a better understanding of complement clauses (arguments to verbs like say, believe, hope) and their semantic and syntactic peculiarities when it comes to their embedding. The main hypothesis that we are pursuing is that their relation to the matrix predicate is not direct, but mediated, a property that they share with relative and adverbial clauses (tripartite theory). It will involve a detailed examination of the morpho-syntactic variation, which is found cross-linguistically when it comes to the lexical source(s) of the various complementizers, combined with an examination of two competing semantic approaches, namely the traditional one that takes complement clauses to be argumentative entities and the one that analyzes embedded clauses as being predicative of an (abstract) object in the matrix clause.
The project is run by
Katrin Axel-Tober (Universität Tübingen)
Ellen Brandner (Universität Stuttgart)
Richard Faure (Université de Tours, CeTHiS)
Friederike Moltmann (Université Côte d’Azur-CNRS, BCL)
Cooperation partners include
Boban Arsenijević (Universität Graz)
Marcel Den Dikken (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)
Ricardo Etxepare (Université Bordeaux Montaigne-CNRS, IKER)
Orin Percus (Université de Nantes, LLING)
Four PhD students (Furkan Dikmen, Anastasiia Dmitrieva, Melle Groen, Kouka Samuel Zongo) have joined the team (see the member page). One engineer and several interns will soon participate in the project as well.
Three workshops and a conference will be organized during the project.