In this thesis, the syntactic and semantic properties of comment and reporting clauses in Germanic (Dutch, English and German) and Romance (French and Spanish) languages are investigated by means of two questionnaires. It is shown that Romance and Germanic comment and reporting clauses share many of their more general properties, such as the ability to accept different subject, verb, tense, auxiliary and adverbial types. However, some characteristics only appear to be language(family)-specific, such as the possibility of negation in comment and reporting clauses and negative concord and the fact that subject-verb inversion is strongly preferred in Spanish and obligatory in French, but is not in any of the Germanic languages.
Furthermore, it is demonstrated that comment and reporting clauses can best be accounted for by a parenthetical analysis, which assumes that the comment or reporting clause and the associated clause are generated separately and later joined together. By adding the projections Ev(identical)P(hrase) and Ep(istempic)P(hrase) it is also possible to express their possible modal functions. Evidence is also presented against other analyses, such as Ross’s (1973) slifting analysis.
