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Nominalization has been described as an accompanying property or strategy for relativization, in particular for internally headed relative clauses and for headless or free relative clauses (Andrews 2007, Comrie and Thompson 2007, Keenan 1985, and Shibatani 2009). Comrie and Thompson (2007:379) claim that there are no formal distinctions between nominalization and relativization in certain languages, while Shibatani further argues that what have been mistakenly identified as relative clauses in some languages are in fact nominalizations, since they are neither syntactically nor semantically dependent on the nominal head they modify (2009:163). This paper establishes that Chimariko, an extinct language of Northern California, uses clausal nominalization as a relativization strategy, similar to what has been found for Diegueño, Mojave, Wappo, Quechua, and many other languages. In Chimariko, relative clauses are subordinate restrictive clauses which are either internally headed or headless. They include the four characteristics expected in relative clause constructions (Keenan 1985): (1) they are sentence-like; (2) they consist of a head noun (present or inferred) and a relative clause; (3) they have a total of two predicates; and (4) they describe or delimit an argument. However, the verbal suffix marking dependency in these clauses could be interpreted either as a relativizer or as a clausal nominalizer paralleling constructions found in Diegueño and many other languages. Functionally. these constructions represent relative clauses given that they are restrictive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been claimed that all languages have complementation (Noonan 1985), but this assumption has been called into question (Thompson 2002, Englebretson 2003, and Dixon 1995). An examination of Chimariko texts reveals no syntactic evidence for complementation. Chimariko is a polysynthetic language with a complex verb morphology which follows a hierarchical system, as well as an agent--patient distinction, in the marking of core arguments. There are no obvious complementizers, and putative complements are never marked as arguments on a predicate. The semantic concepts expressed by complements in some languages are coded in Chimariko (1) as separate clauses with no reduction of the predicates or any other restrictions or (2) as an integral part of the verbal morphology. By applying Noonan's analysis of semantic classes of complement taking predicates to Chimariko, I demonstrate that this language represents a counterexample to the universality claim that all languages have complementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]