Epistemic Complementizers. A cross-linguistic survey.

This paper presents a cross-linguistic survey of epistemic complementizers: complementizers that indicate degree of certainty about and/or type of information source of the proposition expressed by the complement clause. Based on data from a genetically stratified sample of 89 languages, the paper has two main objectives:. 1. It presents a typological survey of patterns pertaining to epistemic complementizers, including their cross-linguistic frequency, the meanings they express, and the ways in which they combine into systems involving multiple markers.2. It shows that a systematic treatment of the semantics of (epistemic and other) complementizers provides an explanatory framework for their relative morpho-syntactic markedness, for conditions on their omission, and for their combinability with other means of epistemic marking in the complement clause.