Abstract
This chapter introduces the central theoretical concerns taken up in the subsequent chapters, laying the necessary groundwork for the discussions of subject and object control, and provides a preview of the content and aims of the rest of the book. Key issues include the postulation of understood arguments in non-finite complements, and the status of to as both an infinitive marker and a preposition. The continuation of work on the Choice Principle in the context of adjectival complementation is a major theme in the book, and a brief introduction to the Principle is also provided here. Motivation for the present work is given, as well as a discussion of the corpora used to provide the data.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In Duffley’s second example the -ing form is a gerund-participle in the terminology that he uses. However, in the present volume the more traditional label “gerund” is used for the -ing form in the type of sentence illustrated by Duffley .
- 3.
For a comprehensive study of different approaches to control in generative grammar, see Landau (2013).
- 4.
It has sometimes been argued that infinitival to is a “dummy (i.e. meaningless) functor with no intrinsic semantic content ” (Radford 1997, 52), but the present authors prefer to think that infinitival to, similarly to other constituents under the Infl (or Aux ) node, may carry a meaning. (For further comments, see Chap. 2.)
- 5.
Mollin (2007) notes that Hansard transcripts may sometimes suffer from some transcription problems. However, it is not clear that the problems brought to light involve the omission or insertion of a particular type of object. Therefore, pending the compilation of a similarly large diachronic corpus of British English, the investigator seems justified in using the Hansard Corpus as a source of data in this type of study.
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Rickman, P., Rudanko, J. (2018). Introduction. In: Corpus-Based Studies on Non-Finite Complements in Recent English. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72989-3_1
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