We see that in North Germanic, there are no (obvious) syncretisms with the complementizer. In West Germanic, complementizers are often syncretic with the relativizer and the distal 3SG neuter Dem, but they are not syncretic with Wh. Wh and Indet are syncretic in Icelandic, Dutch, German, and Yiddish (cf. Ice. eitt-hvað ‘something’, Du. iets ‘something’ but also wat ‘some(thing)’, Ger. et-was ‘something’, Yid. et-vos ‘something’).

Note that where German has et-was, Swiss German has öp-is ‘something’ (vs. öp-er ‘someone’), suggesting -is (and -er) are indeterminate nouns (see also Leu 2016). Note that Swiss German -is is not syncretic with the item in the next cell (Wh was). The fact that Wh and Indet are very frequently syncretic might suggest that Indet is not really distinct from Wh and that what we have labeled Indet (e.g. in Fr. quel-que) is just Wh. To us the Swiss German (and probably Bulgarian) facts prove that Indet and Wh really are separate entities.

In Romance (minus Romanian), Comp, Rel, Wh and Indet are all syncretic with each other, but these are not syncretic with Dem. Romanian has one declarative complementizer, că. Complementizer că is the complementizer by default, appearing almost everywhere except under predicates selecting the subjunctive mood (see fn. 8 and also Baunaz & Lander 2017a for more details). Că is not syncretic with Rel, Wh, Dem or Indet. Note also that ce is used as a relativizer, and that this item is syncretic with the Wh item meaning ‘what’ (Grosu 1994; Benţea 2010, among others), as well as with the Indet word meaning ‘thing’ (cf. Ro. ce-va ‘something’, ori-ce ‘anything’).

The Hungarian complementizer hogy (related to Rel a-hogy and Wh manner adverbial hogy(an) ‘how, in which manner/way’) is not syncretic with Dem a-z, Rvz a-mi, Wh mi or Indet -mi, though there is syncretism between a-mi and mi (the a- in the Rel marker is likely a D-marker, much like th-/d- in West Germanic). For Indet consider vala-mi ‘something, anything’, bár-mi ‘anything, whatever’.

The Finnish complementizer että is syncretic with neither Rel, Wh and Indet. That Finnish että is nominal can be argued on the basis of the fact that it is historically derived from the demonstrative *e- (see ez ‘this’ in Hungarian). The -ttä component is taken to be a modal ending, with the original meaning of ‘in this way, so’ (Keevallik 2008: 141). We may note that the Finnish proximal demonstrative tä- derives from another root than -ttä, but that their phonological similarity may perhaps be synchronically analyzable in terms of a nascent Dem/Comp syncretism. As for mi-, it is syncretic with Rel, Wh, and Indet (mi-kä hyvänsä ‘anything’, ei mi-kään ‘nothing’), as in Hungarian. For the Wh paradigm, mi- is the inanimate stem (vs. the animate stem ke-).

Modern Greek has two different complementizers (though see fn.8 above). Pu introduces factive complements, and oti introduces non-factive complements. Complementizer pu is syncretic with the relativizer pu, but not with Dem. We note that the locative Rel pronoun ó-pu is bimorphemic, combining interrogative pu with the definite article o- (cf. Hungarian a-hogy, a-mi above). Oti may also introduce epistemic factive complements (but not emotive factive complements). MG complementizer pu is thus the factive complementizer which we single out in our data. It is syncretic with Rel, but not with Dem, Wh, and Indet. Wh and Indet, however, are syncretic (consider Indet in ká-ti ‘something’, tí-pota ‘anything’).

The complementizer by default in Russian is čto. Čto is syncretic with the Rvz, Wh and Indet (i.e. čto-to ‘something’, ne-čto ‘something specific’), though not with Dem to.

Polish że is not syncretic with anything in the standard language, but it is syncretic with a relativizer which is available in South-Eastern Polish and in some non-standard varieties of Polish. We note that relativizer and the Wh-word co are also syncretic with the Indet -co (see Po. co-ś ‘something’).

The default complementizer že in Czech has similar properties as its Polish cognate, though it does not seem to serve as a relativizer in any Czech varieties we know of. Czech co also shows Rvz/Wh/Indet syncretism (see Czech ně-co ‘something’ for Indet), as in Polish.

Like Modern Greek, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian lexicalize two complementizers: da and što in SC, and če and deto in Bulgarian. In Serbo-Croatian the complementizer da is the complementizer by default. It is not syncretic with Rel, Wh, Indet, or Dem. The use of SC što is quite limited: it only appears under emotive factive verbs. It is syncretic with Rvz, Wh and Indet (for which consider SC ni-šta ‘nothing’, ne-što ‘something’).9 In addition, just like in Russian, SC što is partially syncretic with the 3.SG demonstrative to. In Bulgarian, the complementizer če appears in most environments, with the notable exception of under emotive factive verbs, where deto is used. Comp deto is syncretic with Rvz deto, but not with Wh kakvo ‘what’ or with Indet -shto (see Bg. ni-shto ‘nothing, anything’, ne-shto ‘something’). See also fn.8 above.

Finally, the emotive factive complementizer in Macedonian is što, which is also a relativizer, a Wh-pronoun and an Indet (for which consider Mac. ni-što ‘nothing’, ne-što ‘something’), instantiating a Rvz/Wh/Indet syncretism. Though deka is the default complementizer (i.e. not the emotive factive complementizer), we include it here to show that it is syncretic with Rvz deka in this language.

The elements in Table 1 can be decomposed further, strongly suggesting that they have a complex internal structure. Taking a look at English, it is clear that the Dem items can be segmented into two parts, as seen in (10). (For now we provide forms in their standard orthography, but more phonologically precise representations are given later in the paper).

This is also the case for the Dem forms of the other Germanic languages (except Yiddish, for which see below). Some examples are given in (11).

There is a common trend of analyses which argue in favor of the initial element in Germanic being an instantiation of definiteness/the definite article (D) (see Déchaine & Wiltschko 2002; Kayne 2005; Kayne & Pollock 2010; Roehrs 2010; Leu 2015, among others). This would mean that D is contained within Dem.

Furthermore, a wh-marker is also found throughout Wh-items in Germanic, as seen in (12).

Focusing now on the specific elements which participate in the syncretisms being tracked in Table 1 – i.e. the neutral neuter/inanimate singular forms (Eng. that/what, Du. dat/wat, Ger. das/was, etc.) – we can note that the prefix is variable, that is, alternating between D and Wh morphemes depending on function, while the rest of the form is (in most languages) invariant, that is, not alternating depending on function (e.g. Icel. -að, Du. -at, Ger. -as). In other words we can speak of a basic bimorphemic structure as in Table 3, where the first part displays a morphological alternation and the second part remains stable. In Table 3 we label these two components F (for ‘functional’) and Base.

The decomposition in Table 3, however, is only an approximation. It can be seen that Base in Table 3 actually contains (at least) two elements: a vowel and a consonant. Taking Dutch and German, the consonant (Du. -t, Ger. -s) can be identified with frozen inflectional/agreement (Φ) morphology (cf. German strong adjective ending for neuter nominative/accusative, i.e. -es/-s; see also Leu 2015, for instance). This leaves the vowel (Du. -ɑ-, Ger. -a-) as the “true” realization of what we have called Base.

Obviously, since the non-decomposed Base in Table 3 was invariant, each of the individual components resulting from decomposition in Table 4 inherit this property of invariance. That is, neither Du. -ɑ- / Ger. -a- nor Du. -t / Ger. -s show any kind of morphophonological alternation throughout the paradigm.

Even languages with (apparently) more complex systems can be seen to fall into a tripartite structure with invariant Base and Inflection components. The relevant Icelandic forms are given in Table 5, where we note that sem is very likely a portmanteau that is not overtly decomposable (though the fact that að can cooccur with it might put this part of the relativizer on a par with the other -a- cores identified in the table). Here and in the tables that follow gray shading will be used to highlight portmanteau elements.

First, -ð is uncontroversially the neuter singular inflectional marker in Icelandic, and not surprisingly it remains stable in Table 5. As for the Base, besides sem (which we have taken to be a portmanteau), the only obstacle to Icelandic showing us another instantiation of an invariant Base seems to be the long vowel in the Wh/Indet pronoun (i.e. Wh /k^hv-aː-ð/ vs. short /-a-/ elsewhere). However, this is a non-issue since vowel length is a non-contrastive, predictable (hence allophonic) property in Icelandic. Thus there is no real phonological reason stopping us from equating this long -aː- with the short -a- seen elsewhere in the paradigm.

Yiddish too, with some additional investigation, can be seen to fall in line with the expectation of an invariant Base and Inflection. We will begin with the Base. In Table 6, we see that -o- is a plausible candidate for the realization of an invariant Base in Yiddish. Once again, the apparently deviant form, this time the demonstrative pronoun jenc, can plausibly be analyzed as a portmanteau jent- (consisting of both F and Base). Note in particular that the ending /-ts/ in Dem jenc could be seen to deviate from the regular -s in the rest of the paradigm. Interestingly, Jacobs (2005: 112) writes that “[s]urface phonetic affricates are frequently found between consonants l, n, and a following sibilant” (but then immediately following with “though this might be seen as a historical process”). In other words, depending on one’s analysis of such affricates in Yiddish, one could defend the view that /-ts/ should be analyzed simply as /-s/ in this case, with the (predictable) insertion of the stop /-t-/ in this particular environment (i.e. /jen-s/ > jenc [jents]), bringing this ending in line with the rest of the paradigm as well.

Even if the process of t-insertion is historic and not a part of the active phonological processes, one can still say that the -t- is part of the portmanteau.12 Thus jent- is not decomposable and thus cannot be expected to show the Base.

The discussion of Yiddish jen(t)- leads us quite smoothly into Slavic, where a packaging similar to jent- is on full display. In order to set the background, we start from SC što and Ru. čto (we leave Bulgarian and Macedonian for future work), where we observe the same tri-morphemic template as in West Germanic: SC /ʃ-t-o/ and Ru. /ʂ-t-o/. This is shown in Table 7. Historically, /ʃ/ and /ʂ/ derive from palatalization of the wh-morpheme k- before a front vowel (i.e. Proto-Balto-Slavic *ki-to > Proto-Slavic *čь-to ‘what’). The second consonant t- is the demonstrative root, and -o is the neuter singular inflection.

Polish and Czech, however, do not fit in as neatly. While Dem t-o can be decomposed just as in Serbo-Croatian and Russian, Comp że /ʐe/ (Polish), že/ʒe/ (Czech) and Rel/Wh/Indet co /t͡so/ (both Polish and Czech) are less straightforward: not only are the consonants different, but in Comp the vowel is also divergent (i.e. Comp /-e/ vs. /-o/ in Dem, Rel, Wh, and Indet). We think a natural approach for Polish and Czech would be to analyze the initial affricate /t͡s-/ in Rel/Wh/Indet co /t͡so/ as a portmanteau of F and Base (like Yiddish jen-), as shown in Table 8.13

Furthermore, the alternation between -e and -o in Table 8 also falls out in a completely regular way, since -e is in fact an allophone of -o after “soft” consonants (e.g. Po. ż- /ʐ/ and Cz. ž- /ʒ/). This means that Polish Comp ż-e and Czech complementizer ž-e have exactly the same basic structure as Serbo-Croatian and Russian Comp/Rel/Wh/Indet što/čto above, with the same neuter singular ending as well.

In sum, in Polish and Czech both Comp ž-e and Rel/Wh/Indet c-o are underlyingly tripartite structures, with the initial affricate being analyzed as a portmanteau morpheme.

If we start by looking at French, though, it is clear that it is amenable to an analysis like the one provided for Slavic above, where /k-/ in que /kǝ/ is a bigger chunk of structure, composed of both F and the Base component. Indeed, the same can be posited for ce /sǝ/, as shown in Table 9.14

If we had taken /s-/ or /k-/ to be the Base, then the F column would require a null morpheme, which we take to be an undesirable analysis, preferring to see these consonants as portmanteau morphemes encoding both the F ingredient and the Base.15 However, an unfortunate result of the portmanteaux in French is that the Base cannot be overtly identified, since decomposition is not possible.

Turning now to Italian, the same analysis can, simply for the sake of parsimony, be given for It. che /k-e/. As for Dem quello /kwello/, on the other hand, there is reason to think that it should be segmented slightly differently, i.e. /kwe-llo/. Indeed, as seen in (11), Italian demonstratives overtly contain the definite article.

Now, if we identify Def with the F slot, then we can keep Italian on a par with much of Germanic by putting -(l)lo here as well. The leftover morpheme, namely /kwe-/, appears to be quite large. We can offer two possibilities for /kwe-/: either it can be segmented as /kw-/ plus /-e/, or it is a portmanteau made up of both Base and Inflection. The first option is more interesting: not only does it leave us with a regular /-e/ ending in the right-hand column throughout the paradigm, but more importantly it means that the nominal core emerges in the Dem form (recall that it remained hidden in French above) as kw-. Therefore we have shown this first option in Table 10 below. The Base emerges in Dem in Italian.

Finally we can take a look at the Romanian forms, where it seems possible to uncover a realization of the Base. First of all, we might assume that Comp că /kǝ/ has the same underlying structure as in French and Italian, namely that the initial stop is a portmanteau of F and Base. However, since the vowel is different in Comp (schwa rather than /e/), it would be better to analyze the entire form as an idiomatic portmanteau of F, Base, and Inflection. This approach allows us to posit that the vowel /e/ is a completely regular morpheme in the rest of the paradigm. Furthermore, Dem contains the definite article in Romanian, as it does in Italian. See Tables 11–12 (from Savu & Bican-Miclescu 2012).

This means that -l in (a-)cel /tʃ-e-l/ needs to be put in the F column. Finally we abstract away from a- in acel since it is droppable in the vernacular. As seen in Table 13, this leaves us with a nominal core tʃ-.

As we will explain below, /tʃ-/ in Rel, Wh, and Indet is technically not an overt realization of the Base; rather, in these forms /tʃ-/ must be a portmanteau of both F and Base. Only in the Dem form is /tʃ-/ an overt realization of the Base in Romanian. See section 5.3 for further details.

We now turn to English, with its even more complex (and seemingly problematic) paradigm. In Table 14 we see the English forms, and despite what seems to be a high degree of decompositionality, there is some variation in what is expected to be the invariant Base ingredient: -æ- or -ʌ-/-ɒ-?

One interesting fact relevant for our purposes here concerns the marking of distal/neutral vs. proximal. Note that this distinction in English is actually accomplished by the contrast /-æt/ vs. /-ɪs/ (rather than, say, /-æ-/ vs. /-ɪ-/).16 In other words, there is reason to want to keep /-æt/ in that as a unit rather than splitting it up into two parts (i.e. /-æ-/ plus /-t/). For Comp and Rel, however, which are not meant to encode spatial deixis, this reasoning does not apply.

There is also an important detail about Comp and Rel that sets them apart from Dem, in that they have reduced forms that Dem does not (i.e. /ðət/, as in The fact /ðət/ he bought new clothes… or the man /ðət/ came to dinner but not */ðət/ girl is my daughter). Interestingly, the first part of this reduced form is homophonous with the definite article in English, i.e. the /ðə/. (Note that, at least for Rel, affixation of the definite article – or at least something syncretic with the definite article – is crosslinguistically common: Fr. le-quel, Hu. a-mi, MG ó-pu and even Comp o-ti.) In other words, we have reason to group /ðə-/ as a unit in Comp and Rel (in the same way we grouped /-æt/ as a unit for Dem). Indet is not syncretic with anything: because it is not overtly decomposable and also quite large (i.e. about the same size as the lexical noun thing), we propose that it is a portmanteau of F, Base, and Inflection. This brings us to the revised table for English, in Table 15.

As seen in Table 15, the Base now reveals itself in the interrogative pronoun, namely the vowel -ʌ- in American varieties and -ɒ- in UK varieties.

We have argued for a tripartite underlying structure for Dem, Comp, Rel, and Wh items. Crucially, in various cases it can be shown with some further investigation that languages which do not seem to fit the tripartite mold at first actually are not counterexamples to our hypothesis at all. Instead, these languages just require a more careful approach, where complicating factors about phonological processes or structural considerations concerning possible portmanteau morphemes (which are typically treated as “phonological idioms” in nanosyntax) are kept in mind.

Since the Base is invariant, it will not grow and shrink in the typical subset-superset manner that nanosyntactic theory makes use of in its account of syncretism (Caha 2009) – but if we are correct about the Base, then there is no syncretism to account for anyway. We will take a similar stance towards the frozen set of Φ features (Inflection) as well, namely that it is a constant, invariant piece of structure. This leaves us with F. That is, F is the source of the syncretism patterns we have identified in a number of languages in Table 1 above. It is this part which involves cumulative structure-building in the nanosyntactic sense. In the languages we have considered here, then, we end up with an F that alternates based on the particular function (Dem, Comp, Rel, Wh, or Indet) and two invariant ingredients, Base and Infl.

These results can now be represented in Tables 16, 17, 18, 19 below, where F is now represented with a larger cell in the Dem row, and then gradually smaller down to Indet. Reflecting the basic facts in Table 1, F is either syncretic with Dem, Comp, Rel (German, Dutch), or with Comp, Rel, Wh, Indet (Yiddish), pointing to the hierarchy Dem > Comp > Rel > Wh > Indet.

The nominal core in these five languages has also been revealed as a vowel: Ger. -a-, Du. -ɑ-, Icel. -a-, Yid. -o- and English -ʌ- (Am.) and -ɒ- (UK). Inflection is overtly realized as the 3^rd person neuter morpheme of these languages.

As for German and Dutch, decomposing the relevant forms into three parts in Serbo-Croatian and Russian does indeed result in a plausible candidate for the “genuine” nominal core (SC/Ru. -t-). Syncretism in the F column is with Comp, Rel, Wh and Indet (just like in Yiddish above). Following our analysis from section 3.1.2 above, we propose to represent SC and Russian as in Table 20.

Recall that in Polish and Czech, the initial affricate /t͡s-/ in Rel/Wh/Indet co /t͡so/ is a portmanteau of F and Base (like Yiddish jen-). The only instance where the Base is overtly realized is with Dem t-o (see also fn. 15) in both languages. This is represented in Table 21.

In section 3.1.3 we argued for an analysis for French amenable to the one provided for Slavic, where /k-/ in que /kǝ/ is a bigger chunk of structure, composed of both F and n, i.e. /k-/ is a portmanteau. In French, thus, the nominal core cannot be overtly identified, since decomposition is not possible. The same can be posited for ce /sǝ/, as shown in Table 22.

Recall that we argued for a similar analysis for Italian, with Dem quello /kwello/ segmented slightly differently, i.e. /kwe-llo/. Morphologically we argued that -(l)lo occupies the F position, while /kwe-/, being quite large, should be segmented as /kw-/ plus /-e/: not only does it leave us with a regular /-e/ ending in the right-hand column throughout the paradigm, but more importantly it means that the nominal core emerges in the Dem form (recall that it remained hidden in French above) as kw-. This is shown in Table 23.

Romanian Comp că /kǝ/ has been analyzed as an idiomatic portmanteau of F, n, and Infl. The vowel /e/ in Dem acel, Rel, Wh and Indet ce is a completely regular morpheme in the rest of the paradigm. Also Dem contains the definite article in Romanian, as it does in Italian, meaning that -l in (a-)cel /tʃ-e-l/ needs to be put in the F column. As seen in Table 24, this seems to leave us with a nominal core tʃ-.

Note here that the /tʃ-/ elements appearing in Rel, Wh, and Indet are technically not overt realizations of the nominal core, but portmanteau morphemes of both F and n. If they were not realizations of both F and n and only represented n, then the F column would be left empty for no (apparent) reason in Rel, Wh, and Indet.

In the Dem form specifically, however, /tʃ-/ is in fact an overt realization of the nominal core. Consider (13).19

As shown in (13b), the affricate /tʃ-/ spells out both F and the nominal core in Comp, Rel, Wh, and Indet. In Dem, however, F is spelled out as the definite article /-l/, leaving the nominal core [n] still without a spellout. If there had been a specific lexical entry for the structure [n], then it would be expected to surface here. However, apparently the Romanian lexicon lacks such an entry, and has to make do with the lexical entry for /tʃ-/ in order to spell out [n] (a perfectly legal option afforded by the Superset Principle). Thus /tʃ-/ is an overt realization of the Romanian nominal core in precisely the Dem form.