ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss these issues and investigate how evidence from Icelandic syntax can help us choose between alternative approaches. The basic issues involved here illustrates by giving a few examples and briefly outlining some well known approaches to the description of complements of this sort in various languages, most notably in English. The transformational approach is frequently contrasted with the so-called interpretive approaches such as Jackendoff's (1972). A crucial aspect of Jackendoff's framework is the fact that semantic interpretation is no longer restricted to deep structure. Hence it is no longer necessary that the deep structures for sentence pairs like our promise vs. allow Ss in above reflect the difference in understood embedded clause subject. Instead, Jackendoff assumes that in both cases the embedded clauses have an 'empty' syntactic subject in underlying structure.
