On Complementizers: Toward a Syntactic Theory of Complement Types, 1970
Raffaella Zanuttini, Thomas Leu, Richard Kayne · 2013
In the late 1960s, the syntactic component of the grammar consisted of two parts: phrase structure rules, which determined the deep structure (DS) of a sentence, and the transformational component, which derived the surface structure (SS) from the DS, via a combination of deletion, insertion, and displacement operations. DS was taken to characterize the semantic interpretation of a sentence; from a single DS, transformations could derive distinct SSs representing the different surface forms, such as active and passive, that express the meaning represented by that DS. Bresnan's article presents several pieces of evidence for the presence of complementizers at DS, two of which are as follows. First, if complementizers are inserted by transformational rules, one would expect them to be semantically empty – that is, they should not affect the meaning of the sentence.