Anacolutha, syntactic planes, and constructions: Recomplementation in discourse and grammar

This article deals with the syntactic phenomenon known as recomplementation , which involves the use of two or more interspersed complementizers seemingly belonging to the same complementizer phrase and linked to the same complement clause within it (e.g., My hope is that by the time we meet that we’ll have made some progress ). After a brief overview of previous templatic approaches and their shortcomings, two lines of analysis grounded in the notion of restart are discussed. The case is made, drawing mainly on readily available data from English and Spanish, that recomplementation structures are multiplanar anacolutha, consistently with early treatments of the phenomenon. It is argued, however, that these structures cannot be reduced to performance deviations across the board, since they appear to have been grammatically licensed historically. This is illustrated with Old Romance data, viewed from a construction grammar perspective. By utilizing the concept of syntactic plane and demonstrating the grammatical potential of phenomena such as anacolutha, this work challenges widely held assumptions in the discipline and contributes to a fuller appreciation of the possibilities of syntactic structure and of languages as conventional systems.