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I had a lengthy discussion today about complementizers and relative items with BillJ. At the end of it, I found a better understanding of all.
Come to find out, complement heads are not always subordinating conjunctions, and relative pronouns can indeed act as complement in different situations. They key is thinking of everything semantically, and in layers. If you are interested, here is the link: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/464036/what-exactly-falls-under-the-label-of-complement?noredirect=1#comment1120288_464036

Scroll to the end of my comments to BillJ

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

allexkramer432I had a lengthy discussion today about complementizers and relative items with BillJ.

Just a small comment. An observation.

It seems to me that, at least to some minor extent, you and Bill are working at cross purposes.

Bill writes:

Matthews in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics defines it as 'A syntactic element seen as completing the construction of another element' (the syntactic concept construction is preferable to the semantic concept meaning).

You conclude:

I think it is key to think of complements in purely semantic situations. If you do not, its hard to understand them.

The question that comes to mind is how we can identify a complement as a complement without considering the meaning of the element that takes that complement nor the meaning of the complement itself.

The wiggest fout symliss in a grib.

Is "in a grib" a complement of "fout"? Remember, using the syntactic approach you should be able to answer this without knowing the meanings of any of those words.

CJ

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