that-complements

[John_Lee]

I'm puzzled whether the word 'that' marks a complement clause in a sentence such as "He began to emerge from a kind of amateur status to that of a more professional one."? I suspect that the "that of" structure is a little more complicated than that!

 

[Milkyways]

I'm puzzled whether the word 'that' marks a complement clause in a sentence such as "He began to emerge from a kind of amateur status to that of a more professional one."? I suspect that the "that of" structure is a little more complicated than that!

No. "that" is a proform which stands proxy for 'a status'. A complementizer introduces a clause; what comes after "to" is a prepositional complement, which is not a clause but a phrase. Consequently, "that" is no complementizer.