When a ‘say’ clause is combined with a quoted-speech clause, one of two hypothetical pathways may be followed: (a) a complementation pathway on which the ‘say’ clause takes the quoted-speech clause as its complement clause and thus becomes its matrix clause; (b) a conjoining pathway which involves no syntactic operation but rather the loss of a prosodic gap between the two. Following the second pathway, ‘say’ may become grammaticalized into a quotative particle. On neither pathway is ‘say’ grammaticalized into a complementizer. It is proposed that cross-linguistically so-called ‘say’ complementizers, including the alleged Chinese complementizer shuō, are more likely to be not complementizers but rather quotative particles.

中文翻译：

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“say”动词真的通过从句组合语法化为补语吗？

当“say”从句与引语从句组合时，可能会遵循两种假设路径之一：（a）补充路径，“say”从句将引语从句作为其补语从句，从而成为其矩阵从句；(b) 不涉及句法操作但涉及两者之间韵律间隙丧失的连接路径。遵循第二条途径，“say”可能会被语法化为引语助词。在这两种途径中，“say”都没有被语法化为补语。有人提出，跨语言的所谓“说”补足词，包括所谓的汉语补足词“shuō”，更有可能不是补足词，而是引语助词。