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.