The Doubly-Filled COMP Filter and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Revisited

The purpose of this paper is two-folds: One is to re-examine the data that violate the Doubly-Filled COMP Filter (DFCF) from Old and Middle English and other related languages and show various types of co-occurrence of overt complementizers and other materials. The other is to evaluate the two proposals for this violation of the DFCF, namely the split CP analysis such that various elements in the COMP position are different functional heads and the clausal boundary analysis advanced in Jang (2011) such that the DFCF is violated when the clausal boundary is needed to be demarcated. We will show that neither of these proposals are adequate enough to incorporate data from Old English, Early Middle English, Middle English, and some variants of Modem English, as well as other genetically unrelated languages.