This book presents a comprehensive guide to the way speakers of British English use infinitive and –ing clauses as verbal complements. It contains details of the non-finite complementation patterns of over 300 matrix verbs, with a particular emphasis on verbs that occur with more than one type of non-finite complement. Drawing upon data from the British National Corpus, the author shows that some of the views which are to be found in the existing literature on these sorts of clauses are in conflict with the evidence of actual usage. He also shows that there is actually much more regularity in this area than has often been taken to be the case. Moreover, this regularity is shown to be motivated by cognitive-functional factors. An appendix contains details of the relative frequency of all of the constructions dealt with in the study, together with an example of each of them. The book is of interest to language teachers as well as linguists, both theoretical and applied.

This book showcases fresh research into the underexplored territory of complementation through a detailed analysis of gerunds and ‘to’ infinitives involving control in English. Drawing on large electronic corpora of recent English, it examines subject control in adjectival predicate constructions with ‘scared’, ‘terrified’ and ‘afraid’, moving on to a study of object control with the verbal predicate ‘warn’. In each chapter a case study is presented of a matrix adjective that selects both infinitival and gerundial complements, and a central theme is the application of the Choice Principle as a novel factor bearing on complement selection. The authors argue that it is helpful to view the patterns in question as constructions, as combinations of form and meaning, within the system of English predicate complementation, and convincingly demonstrate how a new gerundial pattern has emerged and spread in the course of the last two centuries. This book will appeal to scholars of semantics, corpus linguistics, and historical linguistics as well as those with an interest in variation and change in recent English more generally.

Economy considerations have always played an important role in the generative theory of grammar. Indeed, the very development of the theory has been characterized by natural considerations of simplicity and economy. In the Minimalist Program, the operations of the computational system that produce linguistic expressions must satisfy general considerations of simplicity referred to as Economy Principles. In The Syntax of Nonfinite Complementation: An Economy Approach, the author completes two major research projects that solidify the foundation of the Minimalist Program: the elimination of c-selection and government. He then investigates in detail the nature of the Economy Principles in syntax. The discussion, which focuses on infinitival and participial complements, shows that a number of facts that previously have either not been accounted for or have received unsatisfactory treatment can be explained in a principled way once Economy Principles and, more generally, the Minimalist Program are adopted.

This volume features new and groundbreaking research on recent changes in the English verb phrase.

The Late Modern period is the first in the history of English for which an unprecedented wealth of textual material exists. Using increasingly sophisticated databases, the contributions in this volume explore grammatical usage from the period, specifically morphological and syntactic change, in a broad context. Some chapters explore the socio-historical background of the period while others provide information on prescriptivism, newspaper language, language contact, and regional variation in British and American English. Internal processes of change are discussed against grammaticalisation theory and construction grammar and the rich body of textual evidence is used to draw inferences on the precise nature of historical change. Exposing readers to a wealth of data that informs the description of a broad range of syntactic phenomena, this book is ideal for graduate students and researchers interested in historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and language development.

This monograph examines the syntax of bare infinitival and participial complements of perception verbs in English and other European languages, and investigates the general conditions under which verbal complement clauses are licensed. The introductory chapter is followed by an overview of the major syntactic and semantic characteristics of non-finite complements of perception verbs in English. The third chapter presents an analysis within the framework of Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program according to which event-denoting complements are minimally realised as projections of an aspectual head. In the next chapter, it is argued that verbs capable of licensing aspectual complement clauses must be able to function as a special type of control predicate, an assumption which is shown to account for a number of seemingly unrelated properties of the constructions under consideration. The final chapter examines syntactically reduced clausal complements from a cross-linguistic perspective, showing that Southern Romance languages differ from Germanic ones with respect to the availability of 'bare' aspectual complement clauses, a difference that is attributed to morphological properties of verbs in these languages.