IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE FOR COMPLEMENTATION IN CHIMARIKO?

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]