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What does semantic functions mean? and what are they for a CP?

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  • Agent, theme, recipient and so on.
    – User384789
    Oct 18, 2019 at 21:23
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    "complementizer"
    – Alex B.
    Oct 21, 2019 at 1:24

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None. The only difference between a CP and the phrase from which it is derived is syntactic. For instance, the sense of the relative clause in

Maude was naughty, which surprised us all.

is, replacing the "which" by its antecedent,

[Maude was naughty] surprised us all.

which is not grammatical only because a sentence cannot be the subject of a sentence. This is a syntactic requirement. Without any change to the meaning, if we just add the complementizer "that" as syntactic sugar(q.v.), we get the acceptable

That Maude was naughty surprised us all.

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