Reflexiones en torno a la supresión del complementante en espanyol, inglés y catalán

In this paper we deal with the «complementizer deletion» phenomenon in three languages: English, Spanish and Catalan. First, we begin by considering empirical data of the phenomenon in the three languages. As we shall see, the English data differ substantially from the data in Spanish and Catalan. In the former, that-deletion is more frequent in speech, and it appears in very frequently used contexts, like finite subordinate clauses of factive verbs. Conversely, in Spanish and Catalan the use of the equivalent construction is highly restrictive contextwise, mainly a subset of subordinate clauses showing subjunctive mood. It seems to us that these differences cannot be reconciled in a unified theoretical proposal, so we consider two distinct ones. As for English, we believe that an account that does not make reference to the narrow syntax fares well with the data. However, for Spanish and Catalan we prefer to maintain that the mechanism that allows the complementizer to be absent is syntactic, namely verb movement.