More on Content Clauses

Abstract

Content Clauses have the canonical form: "head noun - that – content clause". "The belief that the moon is bigger than the sun" is an example. Superficially, content cla uses resemble relative clauses, but they are differ· ent syntactically and semantically. Matters of special interest concerning More on Content Clauses 405 content clauses are : (i) types of head nouns, (ii) the source of head nouns, and (iii) the status of the such -that construction (a semi–English expression). Head nouns are categorized into three types: affirmative, pseudo-negative, and negative. Negative head nouns negate their content clauses, whereas affirmative and pseudo-negative head nouns negate their content clauses, whereas affirmative and pseudo-negative head nouns do not. For the source of head nouns, one might consider the verb-noun correspondence hypothesis (e.g. I believe that the moon is bigger than the sun→My/The belief that the moon is bigger than the sun).