Explaining Grammatical Variation and Change: A Case Study of Complementation in American English over Three Decades

Abstract

This article examines sentential complements of the adjective accustomed involving subject control in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s on the basis of the TIME Magazine Corpus. Two specific principles are identified to explain the argument structure properties of accustomed. The first is the role of extractions, which is shown to have played a significant role in the 1930s in favor of to infinitives.The other principle is semantic: when the situation encoded by the lower clause predicate involves agentivity and choice on the part of the lower subject, the complement is likely to be of the to infinitive form in the 1930s, whereas a lower clause with a [—Choice] predicate is likely to be of the to -ing type. In the 1940s and 1950s, the to infinitive declines rapidly in frequency, with the to -ing pattern becoming entrenched even in contexts that had favored to infinitives earlier.