This book offers a new and compendious account of important verbal patterns in present-day English. Serving as a central source of data, it updates and refines earlier research contributing to the syntactic and semantic description of English. Rudanko establishes an original framework, and systematically analyzes patterns of complementation using the tool of case grammar. The examination of Control, or EQUI, is a common theme and an important problem for transformationalists, and English syntacticians will value Rudanko’s work on infinitive complements.

"This monograph deals with morphological, syntactic, semantic/pragmatic, discursive and textual variation between to- and bare-infinite (BI) verbal complementation in English. It investigates the reasons that lead certain verbs (specifically, dare, need and help) to opt for one solution or the other in the recent history of English. Non-finite complementation is a highly productive area of research (see Fanego 1996, 1998, 2004; Mair 2003: 329; Taeymans 2004 a, b, 2006; Schlüter 2005; Cuyckens and De Smet 2007; Loureiro-Porto 2009, 2010; Lohmann 2011; van der Auwera and Diewald 2012: 131; Levshina 2018). While there are numerous studies examining to-infinitive vs BI complementation from a syntactic, semantic or cognitive perspective (see Section 1.2), this volume is an attempt to provide a comprehensive analytic analysis of the possible grammatical, structural, semantic/pragmatic, processing, genre, period and identity-avoidance factors affecting to-infinitive/BI complement alternation"--

This dictionary provides a valency description of English verbs, nouns and adjectives. Each entry contains a comprehensive list of the complementation patterns identified on the basis of the largest corpus of English available at the present time. All examples are taken directly from the COBUILD/Birmingham corpus. The valency description comprises statements about the quantitative valency of the lexical units established, an inventory of their obligatory, contextually optional and purely optional complements as well as systematic information on the semantic and collocational properties of the complements. An outline of the model of valency theory used in this dictionary is provided in the introduction.