Review Article: Categorization and Licensing of Subordinating Conjunctions

A review of Dagmar Haumann's The Syntax of Subordination (Tubingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1997) outlines this innovative analysis of subordinating conjunctions as a distinct syntactic category Subcon that conflates properties of the functional head C(omplementizer) with those of the lexical head P(reposition), arguing that the extended projection of the latter is dominated by functional architecture. The traditional subordinate clause is analyzed as a prepositional predicate, the external argument of which is the traditional modified element. Extraction data appear to support this view that subordinate clauses are not pure adjuncts, & the analysis can be extended to adverbial complements by treating them as predications of a matrix clause in the specifier of their dominating functional head. 24 References. J. Hitchcock