Ellipsis of the English Complementizer that

This paper offers a simple novel approach to the distributions of the declarative Comp that and its null counterpart, the null C, in English. It suggests that the overt Comp that is a PF realization of the null C and that the null C must be adjacent to the embedded subject as well as to the matrix predicate. Behind this suggestion lies a core idea--agreement appears on C, thereby agreeing with the subject; when the subject is extracted through Spec of CP, the agreement is suppressed and thus agreement emergence as that fails to be obtained. This approach will be shown to account for many intriguing contrasts in the CP area, for example, different distributions between the Comp that and the null C, (anti-)that-trace effects, the null C without adjacency.