Maltese complement sentences to non-verbs

Abstract

The present work builds on an earlier study on complementation in Maltese which examines the situation arising when a sentence occurs as the argument of a predicate or verb, that is, when it occurs as the subject or object of that verb. Mention is made there of the expression 'li' which overtly marks some, but not all, sentential complements. Since this expression also marks relative clauses in Maltese the decision was taken to label the expression a mark of general subordination, rather than a complementiser. That study also examines sentential complements which can be nominalised, with or without the accompanying encoding of the original subject and/or object expression. It mentions the possibility also of such a nominalised complement being itself embedded in another nominalised complement. The study examines also sentence complements which can be adjectivalised, noting that such adjectivalised complements can, via their derivational morphology, allow to a certain extent either an active or a passive encoding of a given situation. The present paper deals with subordinate sentences which are arguments of parts of speech other than the verb, notably of nouns, adjectives and prepositions, and to a smaller extent, of adverbs.