The development of sentential complement constructions in Greek Evidence from a case study

The development of sentential complements in Greek, a language with systematic use of two complementizers, is studied in a corpus of spontaneous conversations by one girl and her family in the age range of 1;8 to 4 years. Formal, semantic and pragmatic analyses of child and child-directed constructions indicate parallels and divergences from previous acquisition research. Early formal marking of complements suggests ambient language effects. Yet, emergence of semantically/pragmatically more prototypical ones is protracted, favoring usage-based and semantically motivated explanations. The data also contribute to the theoretical description of sentential complement constructions, by charting some of their varieties and also suggesting explanations for the relations holding among these varieties.