Complementation and Common Ground

Abstract Clausal connectives, such as complementizers or circumstantial markers, are highly grammaticalized functional elements. Nevertheless, part of their original meaning can persist after grammaticalization has occurred, so that a seemingly neutral clausal connective can be semantically or pragmatically marked. This article argues that such is the case for the highly polysemous Biblical Hebrew clausal connective ‮ כִּי ‬‎ kī . It shows that this clausal connective presupposes that the information content it introduces is in the Common Ground. Specifically, kī is used in three contexts: (a) to refer to discourse-old information, (b) to introduce information that the Addressee can accommodate, and (c) to present discourse-new information as part of the Common Ground, for discursive effect. The previously described wide variety of uses of kī (introducing object and subject clauses as well as causal, temporal, conditional, adversative, concessive, and resultative circumstantial clauses) can then be derived from contextual clues given the general function of marking Common Ground. Furthermore, I argue that this function of kī is related to its origin as a [+distal] deictic lexeme, which provides a parallel with similar complementizers in unrelated languages. The analysis thus adds to a growing body of evidence for the possibility of employing referential features in the left periphery to express relations between interlocutors on the one hand and information content on the other.