Variation between Finite and Infinitival Clauses as Verb Complements in English.

Abstract

This paper examines subject-control (e.g. promise, guarantee, agree, learn, decide) and object-control verbs (e.g. persuade, convince, remind, advise, instruct) which can take both finite (i.e. that-clause) and infinitival (i.e. to-infinitive) clauses as their complements and accounts for structural factors determining the distribution of the two competing constructions. The quantitative analysis of the data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) containing 570+ million words reveals the following: Compared with the simple structure of a subject-control verb immediately followed by a complement clause, a more complex structure in which a personal object (or a preposition plus personal object) is inserted before the complement clause has a far higher frequency of the occurrence of the finite complement. The same applies to the object-control verbs: Compared with the structure of the verb plus personal object plus complement clause, the insertion of prepositional phrase before the complement clause leads to a higher rate of the use of the finite complement. This shows that a more explicit form (e.g. finite clause) is preferred to a less explicit form (e.g. infinitival clause) in cognitively more complex environment and supports Rohdenburg’s Complexity Principle.