Complementation as interpersonal grammar

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a range of complex sentence constructions including They said to shave, They knew that I had shaved, They forced me to shave which are generally regarded as “object complements”. It is proposed that this analysis is mistaken: complement clauses do not serve as objects. Rather, I will argue that the majority of these constructions are characterized by interclausal grammatical relations of the type referred to in McGregor (1997) as conjugational-whole-to-whole relations rather than part-to-whole relations (as in the relation borne by a genuine object). These grammatical relations construe interpersonal meaning, and can be divided into two independent subtypes: framing and scope, which relate to fundamentally different modes of signifying from the interpersonal perspective, respectively demonstration and description.