COMPLEMENTARY DISTRIBUTION

1. (General) Two elements a and b are in complementary distribution if a, but not b, occurs in those environments where on general grounds we may expect both a and b, while b, but not a occurs in the complementary set of environments. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Phonology) Often taken as an indication that two superficially different elements are one and the same at a deeper level. Two sounds /a/ and /b/ are in complementary distribution when one of the two (/a/) occurs in all environments except those in which /b/ occurs and vice versa.
    Example: In English [p] and [p^h] are in complementary distribution, since [p^h] occurs syllable-initially when it is directly followed by a stressed vowel (cf. pin [p^hin]), whereas in all other positions [p] is found. In Hindi, however, [p] and [p^h] can occur in the same position and are distinctive. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
3. (General) Distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation. The relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other element is found in a non-intersecting (complementary) set of environments.
    The term often indicates that two superficially different elements are the same linguistic unit at a deeper level, though more than two elements can be in complementary distribution with one another. | Wikipedia, 2026
4. (Example)
    ○ Complementary distribution is a consequence of a general principle of evolutionary biology, competitive exclusion. | Mark Aronoff, 2019
    ○ It is widely recognized that plural morphemes and classifiers are in complementary distribution, being unable to co-occur. Recent literature suggests a syntactic account for complementary distribution: A plural morpheme and a classifier realize the same functional head, and thus, they cannot co-occur. | Kyumin Kim and Paul B. Melchin, 2018
    ○ 

   Hypothesis: Manner/Result Complementarity
   Manner and result meaning components are in complementary distribution (Hovav and Levin 2010; cf. Levin and Hovav 1991, 1995): a verb may lexicalize only one.

    | Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav, 2008
    ○ The concept of complementary distribution played an outstanding role in all brands of classical phonology. It is implicitly present in de Saussure's Course (1959), and it is a cornerstone of American descriptive linguistics, which did not receive any impulses from de Saussure. Although, contrary to Eric Hamp (1957), Vachek (1960/2003) did not include complementary distribution in his dictionary, Trubetzkoy made wide use of it in the opening chapters of his Grundzüge der Phonologie (1939). In glossematics, the so-called commutation test is centered on the same concept. | Anatoly Liberman, 1987

COMPLEMENTIZER

1. (Syntax) A conjunction which marks a complement clause. In English:
   1. I know that he is here.
   2. I refuted the supposition that he is here.
   3. I am doubtful that he is here.
   
    | SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, 2003
2. (Syntax) Abbreviated C or COMP. A functional category (part of speech) that includes those words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a sentence. For example, the word that may be called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining. The concept of complementizers is specific to certain modern grammatical theories; in traditional grammar, such words are normally considered conjunctions.
    The complementizer is often held to be the syntactic head of a full clause, which is therefore often represented by the abbreviation CP (for complementizer phrase). Evidence that the complementizer functions as the head of its clause includes that it is commonly the last element in a clause in head-final languages like Korean or Japanese, in which other heads follow their complements, whereas it appears at the start of a clause in head-initial languages such as English, where heads normally precede their complements (Sells 1995). | Wikipedia, 2026
3. (Examples)
    ○ Complementizers show agreement for certain features in some languages: for phi-features (in particular in person and or number) with the embedded subject in dialects of German and Dutch (see Haegeman 1992, a.o.), for tense with the embedded clause in Irish (see Cottell 1995 a.o.), and for phi-features with the matrix subject in certain Bantu languages (see Diercks 2010, 2013, a.o.). | Marjo van Koppen, 2017
    ○ I call those languages hybrid which show a mix of final and initial heads. My goal in this article is to show that hybridity may not only be a surface phenomenon, but that certain forms of it may well be a phenomenon of the base of a given language. With respect to complementizers (which I call C or in glosses COMP), languages of this sort are being found in Northern and Central India, but surely elsewhere too. For instance, certain of Koopman's (1984) examples from Vata suggest that there is a final as well as an initial C: na appears initially in complement CPs in the context V_ as in (1a), while ka appears finally in complement CPs in the context _V as in (1b).
   1. a.
       

      màsIpànyÒ
      healer

      kà
      FUT

      yi
      come

      na
      NA

      Ò
      he

      ká
      FUT

      mÒ
      you

      yamà
      healthy-MA

        'The healer will come to make you healthy'
      b.
       

      màsIpànyÒ
      healer

      kà
      FUT

      mÒ
      you

      yamà
      healthy-MA

      ka
      KA

      yi
      come

        'The healer will come to make you healthy'
   
    | Josef Bayer, 1999

COMPLETIVE ASPECT

1. (Grammar) Refers to an aspectual form that expresses an action that has been carried out "thoroughly and to completion". The term perfective aspect is very similar in meaning, but it is distinguished from completive by several authors. (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994)
    The term completive is occasionally also used for complement clauses. | Glottopedia, 2008
2. (Grammar) Indicates that an action is, has been, or will be definite and complete(d). It implies that the action was definitely accomplished. | H. Schiffman, 2005
3. (Example)
    ○ Completive markers can be used to emphasize the completion of an action as unexpected and unanticipated. | Stefanie Fauconnier, 2013
    ○ The Kannada (Dravidian; India) verb iru 'be' grammaticalized as an auxiliary is concatenated with past participle form of a main verb to express "perfective" aspect. The past tense marked in the main verb takes the action prior to the tense denoted by the auxiliary, thus giving perfective sense. With the verbs of motion, the affixation of iru indicates that the motion is completed, but the result lasted for some time and may still be relevant (Schiffman 1983).
    Another verb that is grammaticalized into auxiliary verb expressing "completive" sense is biDu 'leave'. biDu 'leave' is grammaticalized into an aspectual auxiliary indicating roughly the completion of the action denoted by the main verb in past participle form with the implication that the action is done in an easy and effortless manner or that it was an accidental, unexpected, or unintentional act (Sridhar 1990).
    The verb hoogu 'go' grammaticalized as an auxiliary added to the past participle form of a main verb to denote "completive" aspect. The auxiliary indicates completion of the action expressed by the main verb. Usually the completion caries pejorative nuance (Schiffman 1983).
    The verb aagu 'become' grammaticalized as an auxiliary is added after the main verb to express "finality" aspect. It indicates that the long-awaited result has finally taken place (Schiffman 1983). According to Sridhar (1990) aagu is used with the past participle form the main verb to denote the completion of the action prior to the situation being described.
    The verb hoogu 'go' grammaticalized as perfect aspectual auxiliary is concatenated with the past participle form of the main verb to express completion but with the implication that the event or state denoted by the main verb is regrettable (Sridhar 1990). The auxiliary hoogu is used primarily with intransitive verbs with the implication.
    The verb haaku 'put' grammaticalized as aspectual auxiliary is added with the main verb in past participle form to indicate that the action denoted by main verb is carried out exhaustively, effortlessly and in some cases inconsiderately or maliciously (Sridhar 1990). | Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan, 2019

COMPLETIVE FOCUS

1. (Information Structure) We speak of Completive Focus when the Focus information is meant to fill in a gap in the pragmatic information of the addressee. The clearest case of this is answers to Q-word questions. Thus, when someone asks:
   1. What did John buy?
   
   his partner can infer that he has the following presuppositional structure in his pragmatic information:
   2. John bought x; x = ___.
   
    Question (1) will be interpreted as a request to fill in the blank in this presuppositional structure. When this question is answered by:
   3. John bought coffee_FOC .
   
   the Focus on coffee signals that this particular bit of information is meant to fill in the blank in (2) and is by virtue of that fact the most important information in (3).
    Completive Focus does not involve any specific contrast. | Simon Dik et al., 1981
2. (Information Structure) Or, presentational focus. Completive focus can be regarded as involving selection from an open set of alternatives.
    The construction in example (1) is a case of a non-contrastive completive focus, according to Dik's terminology, in that it "completes" the common ground by supplying the identity of the variable without contrasting it with another entity.
   Biblical Hebrew, 1 Samuel 26:6
   1. a. מִי־יֵרֵד אִתִּי אֶל־שָׁאוּל אֶל־הַמַּחֲנֶה
        mî yêrêḏ ʼittî ʼel šāʼūl ʼel hammaḥăneh
        who will-go-down with-me to Saul in the-camp
       'Who will go down with me into the camp to Saul?'
      b. וַיֹּאמֶר אֲבִישַׁי אֲנִי אֵרֵד עִמָּךְ ׃
        wayyōmer ʼăḇîšay ʼănî ʼêrêḏ ‘immāḵ
        and-said Abishai  I  will-go-down with-you
        'Abishai said, " I  will go down with you." '
   
    | Geoffrey Khan and Christo H.J. van der Merwe, 2019
3. (Examples)
    ○ The current study attempts to examine the acoustics of prosodic focus in different contexts in Mandarin Chinese. The focus types involve "sentence focus" (Lambrecht 1994) as the baseline and "completive focus" and "replacing focus" (Dik et al. 1981) as dependent variables. | Ying Chen, 2018
    ○ The evidence of the WH/focus relationship suggests that question and answer instantiate a distinct type of focus-background partition (completive focus) independent from and orthogonal to primary information structure. Analyzing clefts as another type of completive focus constructions solves a serious problem confronting the movement analysis of narrow focus: in a number of languages showing striking parallels between focus and relative constructions (Schachter 1973) sentence-peripheral foci bind resumptive pronouns without Weak Crossover or island effect. | Hans Bernhard Drubig, 2003
    ○ I have not found any examples at all in the Tundra Yukagir (Yukagir; Russian Federation) texts of completive focus on the verb in answer to questions like 'What did he do?'. Such questions, note, are in the Object Focus (OF) form, as in nemele wiete-meng 'what will you do?'. The answer will be in the Verb Focus form.
    Compare the completive use of the Subject Focus (or OF) construction in "identifying" contexts such as:
   1. Q:
       

      kin-ek
      who-FOC

      Evenge-ngol-el
      Ewenge-be-3SG:SF:INTER

          'Who is Ewenge?'
      A:
       

      met-ek
      I-FOC

      Evenge-ngol-el
      Ewenge-be-1SG:SF:INDIC

          'I am Ewenge.'
   
    | Michael Fortescue, 1996

COMPLETIVE PHRASAL VERB

1. (Grammar) E.g., to burn down, to wipe out, to use up, where the particle has a sense of "completion" and does not usually alter the basic meaning of its verb.
    Fraser (1976) also notes that one common characteristic of many literal and completive phrasal verbs is that the particle may often be deleted without affecting the acceptability of the sentence:
   1. I hung [ up ] the picture.
   2. I tore [ up ] the piece of paper.
   
    | Brock Brady, 1991
2. (Grammar) For completive phrasal verbs, addition of the particle up or down does not mean more or less, but rather completion of an action. Washing up rather than merely washing implies completing personal washing in an intransitive construction, and washing down signifies a complete washing in a transitive construction, e.g., washing down the car. Likewise, the burning up or burning down of something can only decrease the item burned completely in either construction (Nattinger & DeCarrico, in press). Thus there is a limit to the metaphorical sets of figurative phrasal verbs, but also a limited number of completive phrasal verbs where the verb plus particles as up, down, or off or out can signify performing the verb with completion. Tear up vs. tear, worn out vs. worn, cut off vs. cut are further examples of completive phrasal verbs contrasted to an incompletive one word counterpart. | Robert D. Pierce, 1990
3. (Example)
    ○ 
   1. The teacher writes these sentences on the blackboard:
      • He cleaned his room.
      • He cleaned up his room.
      • He mixed the sauce.
      • He mixed up the sauce.
      
      
   2. The teacher elicits from students the difference between the sentences, i.e., that the up in both clean up and mix up completes the action of the verb.
   3. The teacher elicits from students other similar phrasal verbs. E.g., drink up, eat up, open up, close up, close down, burn down.
   4. The teacher mentions that these are completive phrasal verbs and explains how they function.
   
    | Kathleen Ann Ivins, 1986

COMPLEX COMPOUND

1. (Acquisition) Novel English compound nouns of the type clock-maker require knowledge of the appropriate affixes and their placement as well as of modifier-head word order. Children aged 3;0 to 7;0, asked to coin agentive and instrumental compounds, appear to go through three stages in learning how to produce them:
   1. They combine bare verbs with head nouns denoting the pertinent category, as in a wash-man, an open-machine.
   2. They construct ungrammatical compounds from verb phrases with a verb and noun combined, in that order, as in a kick-ball, a build-wall. When they add affixes like -er to such compounds, they add them to the head of these constructions, namely the verb bases in leftmost position, as in a puller-wagon, a builder-wall.
   3. Finally they realize that the heads of compound nouns go in the rightmost slot, regardless of whether the head has a noun or verb base. This leads them to use the appropriate compound order, as in a water-drinker, a wagon-puller.
   
    These stages in production, we argue, are the outcome of reliance on certain acquisitional principles. These account for mastery of affixes before word order, and for reliance on sentential V + O word order prior to mastery of compound, O + V, order in complex compounds. | Eve V. Clark, Barbara Frant Hecht, and Randa C. Mulford, 1986
2. (Examples)
    ○ A complex compound formation like Turkish (Turkic; Turkey) {[yȩsil elma]_NP ağac-ı}_NNC 'a/the green apple tree: tree OF green apples (green apple tree-CM)', which contains a clearly syntactic unit embedded in the compound, cannot be built or explained lexically and thus poses an important problem for the lexicalist analyses of compounding. | Aysun Kunduracı, 2019
    ○ Complex Compound Structures: Most research on compounds, whether theoretical or experimental (e.g., Fiorentino and Poeppel 2007, and references therein), investigates relatively short and simple structures, although it is known that in some languages compounds may be considerably longer, as in (1).
   German
   1. Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
      cattle meat labeling supervision duties law
      'beef labeling regulation and delegation of supervision law'.
   
    Even when longer compounds are discussed, the structures often tend to be relatively simple, as in demonstrations that English can potentially add an unlimited number of words to create compounds, where the structure is usually uniformly (left) branching (e.g., [[[[[tuna] fish] salad] sandwich] platter]). Occasionally compounds that are not uniformly branching are also noted, such as [[[tuna] fish] [[trawling] net]], where tuna fish and trawling net are both compounds. Compounds with more complex internal structure, specifically phrases, have received less attention (but see Bauer 1983, Lieber 1992, Meibauer 2007, Padrosa 2010). | Irene Vogel, 2018
    ○ Compounding is a word formation device found in many languages. A crosslinguistic comparison of compounding structures reveals a striking constraint, however: Complex compounds are found only if the compounding structure in the given language is head final. In languages with head-initial compounds, as in Romance languages, the complexity of nominal compounds is constrained to the trivial size of a two-member compound. | Hubert Haider, 2001

COMPLEX FORCE

1. (Examples)
    ○ Following Lam (2014), we argue that a Cantonese (Sino-Tibetan; China, Hong Kong, Macao, Vietnam) polar question with a gaa3-ho2 cluster introduces a complex sentence act. The complex sentence act is derived not by letting gaa3 and ho2 form a complex force jointly operating on the semantic content of a proposition. Rather, it is derived by ho2 operating on a force-bearing expression. | Jess H.-K. Law, Haoze Li, and Diti Bhadra, 2023
    ○ A complex force approach to force shift:

   
            complex speech act
              /            \
             /              \
      semantic content   complex sentential force (RD)
            p                  /        \
                              /          \
                           quest      evidential
   

   
   ordinary assertion: assert(p)
   rising declarative: RD(p)
    
   Arguments for it:
   • Weakened speaker commitment—introduced by evidential.
   • Presence of question force—introduced by quest.
   A variety of declarative questions:
   1. RD1: You got a haircut? (inquisitive)
   2. RD2: My name is ... Diti Bhadra? (meta-linguistic)
      ⋮
   
    But the declarative syntax has no uniform force contribution. | Jess H.K. Law, Haoze Li, and Diti Bhadra, 2022
    ○ When doctor and patient have seated themselves at either side of doctor's desk, embodying readiness, the physician opens with the Dutch discourse marker zo 'so' as a cue to indicate a shift to the next topic (Bolden 2009, Raymond 2004), before asking
   • hoe GAA:T het met u
     'how is it GO: ING with you'
   
   with strong emphasis on the main verb. Patient delays his answer with nou 'well'—a complexity marker, signalling that the answer may not be equivocal or simple to give (Mazeland 2016)—and formulates a layered answer, giving a moderately positive gloss
   • over het algemeen gaa:t het wel
     'in general things are fairly OK'
   
   of his general condition. This references a holistic overall assessment of his condition, indicating that—within the frame of normality of having been treated for cancer (c.f. Bredmar and Linell 1999) he is doing reasonably well. Then, preceded by delay in the form of a short pause and a sniff, patient limits the scope of the positive gloss with
   • ik heb alleen
     'I've just got'
   
   then a delay (eh), and a first complaint,
   • ben alleen z-heel moe
     'only [I] am s-very tired'
   
   thus creating an exception to his expression of general relative wellness.
    Doctor responds with a continuer (hm-m), inviting patient to elaborate.
    Patient then adds another complaint. By constructing this complex response—combining a positive gloss followed by specific complaints—patient negotiates the complex force of the question in relation to his situation, which can only be done justice to by means of this seeming contradiction. | Manon van der Laaken and Anne Bannink, 2019

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