Complements In English Research Articles

A syntactic analysis of finite clause as an adjective complementation in English

A syntactic analysis of finite clause as an adjective complementation in English

Aspectualizers and their Complementation in English and Romanian

Abstract Aspectualizers as verbs indicating phases in the development of events are typically divided into ingressive (denoting beginning), continuative (denoting continuation) and egressive (denoting ending). These verbs require specific complementation with the lexical verbs which are paired with the aspectualizers. Their analysis starts from the features of such complementation in English (subordinate non-finite infinitival and participial clauses) and compares them with the features of their Romanian translation equivalents. This corpus-based research (with the examples from modern British novels) focuses on the structural characteristics of the complementation in the two languages, lexical aspect of the verbs in the complementation (activities, states, accomplishments, achievements), as well as similarities and differences between the two languages in that respect.

The acquisition of infinitive and gerund as complements in ESL by Mexican undergraduates

Metalinguistic awareness has been assessed primarily throughout metalinguistic knowledge and grammaticality judgment tests. Then, very limited research has been conducted on the attempt to understand how metalinguistic awareness may be developed among adolescents or young adults in verbal group reflection tasks. The present study aims to explore the performance of university students when they reflect on gerund and infinitive complements in English as L2 while they complete consciousness-raising grammar tasks with the intention to develop their metalinguistic awareness. The study links a sociocultural framework with semi-structured stimulated recall interviews on the development of metalinguistic awareness, as both help participants reflect on usage patterns and generalizations of underlying linguistic structures through verbal interaction. The evaluated data consisted of the scores of each task and the speech analysis of the participants. The results reveal that having students identify the underlying rules of gerund and infinitive complements will indirectly contribute to their acquisition. The conclusions pointed to students paying attention to specific features of the language to be fully aware of the form of the linguistic patterns.

When English complement clauses meet evidential adverbs

There is much literature about the licensing of complement clauses by complement-taking predicates. However, less has been written about the licensing of adverbs in a complement clause. This article addresses the licensing of English evidential adverbs in complement clauses extracted from the NOW corpus. The article discusses three factors that determine the distribution of evidential adverbs in complement clauses. These are the nature of the evidential adverbs, the constraints of the complement clause and the anchor of the evidential adverb. To explore the role of these three factors, I adopt the hierarchical scopal theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). If a complement clause licenses the inclusion of the evidential adverb, then there is a match. Should there be no alignment between the complement clause and the adverb, there will be a mismatch. The results of the analysis of the data show that there are mostly matches, which occur with either a current speaker anchor or an actor anchor. Secondly, it appears that in cases of mismatches, there is always a current speaker. It thus appears that a current speaker anchor can override the constraints of the complement clause.

“I Regret Lying" vs. “I Regret that I Lied": Variation in the Clausal Complementation Profile of REGRET in American and British English

The historical development and change of the English complementation system has received a great deal of attention in recent years, but work remains to be done on Present-day English. Previous studies on the complement-taking predicate regret have shown that in British English the choice between a that-clause and the gerundial -ing is non-categorical or probabilistic, with the speaker being able to choose between them. This non-categorical variation is the focus of the present article, which aims to identify any existing differences in the clausal complementation profile of regret in British and American English, as well as any linguistic variables that might determine speaker choice.

Compliment Responses among Non-native English Speakers: Evidence of Pragmatic Transfer from Persian into English

Pragmatic failure contributes to misunderstanding in intercultural communication. Hence, language learners must not only acquire the correct forms of the target language, but also the knowledge of how to use the language pragmatically appropriate in the target culture. This study probes the evidence of pragmatic failure in the English Complement Responses (CRs) of Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The participants were EFL students in a national university in Iran who were asked to take part in a Discourse Completion Test (DTC). This test included some hypothetical situations where the participants were requested provide responses to the compliments. Herbert’s (1986) taxonomy was used to classify the types of the CRs. Findings indicated that the participants transferred some of the Iranian cultural schemas to their CRs expressed in English. It is implied from this study that the teachers should make the EFL learners sensitive to the form and the sound use of CRs in intercultural communication with native English speakers. The results have useful implications for stakeholders in the field of TEFL in general and in Iran in particular.

A morphosyntactic approach to language contact in African varieties of English

ABSTRACT This study aims to widen our knowledge of substrate influence and language transfer in World Englishes through the study of the verb complementation system of REGRET in four African postcolonial varieties. An examination of the most widely spoken substrates in each variety does not seem to explain the different tendencies in the distribution of finite and nonfinite complementation patterns across varieties, since English varieties with different complementation systems in their substrate languages, Kenyan English and Nigerian English, for example, show similar distributions in their use of English complementation. Such differences in the distribution seem to be the result of other factors playing an essential role in language contact situations, namely, the tendency towards transparency in second language varieties, the geographical proximity of the English varieties, and the evolution of the varieties measured in terms of the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2007).

Non-Manner ‘how’-Complements in English and in German

This paper compares the lexical and selectional semantics of non-interrogative, nonmanner how-complements in English and German. It argues that English has two types of such complements: how-complements that are licensed by perception, memory, and fiction verbs and allow paraphrase by a DP of the form ‘the event in which [TP ]’ (see Umbach et al., submitted), and how-complements that are licensed by presuppositional and ‘say’-verbs and allow paraphrase by a DP of the form ‘the fact that [TP ]’ (see Legate, 2010). The paper shows that German only has the first type of non-manner how-complement. It provides a characterization of these types of complements in terms of their observed entailment behavior.

Isoglosses and language change: Evidence of the rise and loss of isoglosses from a comparison of early Greek and early English

AbstractWe analyze the rise and loss of isoglosses in two Indo-European languages, early Greek and early English, which, however, show considerable distance between their structures in many other domains. We follow Keidan’s approach (2013), that has drawn the attention on the fact that the study of isoglosses (i.e., linguistic features common to two or more languages) is connected with common innovations of particular languages after the split into sub-groups of Indo-European: this type of approach aims at collecting isoglosses that appear across the branches of Indo-European. We examine the rise of the isogloss of labile verbs and the loss of the isogloss of the two classes of aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. Our study shows that the rise of labile verbs in both languages is related to the innovative use of intransitives in causative constructions. On the other hand, the innovations in voice morphology follow different directions in Greek and English and are unrelated to the rise of labile verbs. In contrast to labile verbs, which are still predominant for causative-anticausative constructions in both languages, the two classes of aspectual verbs are lost in the later stages of Greek but are predominant even in Present-day English. Again, a “prerequisite” change for the isogloss can be easily located in a structural ambiguity that is relevant for aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. However, another independent development, the changes in verbal complementation (the development of infinitival and participial complements) in Greek and English, determined the loss of this isogloss.

Psycholinguistic Content of Complements in English and Ukrainian

The purpose of the article is: to show functions of compliments in the English and Ukrainian languages; to describe the differences between praise, flattery and compliments; to analyze a system of actual methods of modeling the associative content of the meanings of complementary expressions in the semantic field of the philological consciousness of the respondents of different ethnic groups (Englishmen and Ukrainians).
 The methods of the research are: theoretical ones – categorical and structurally-functional analysis of the texts, the methods of systematization, modeling, generalization; empirical methods – the analysis of novels, a free associative experiment.
 The results of the research. It was distinguished that among the respondents of the Ukrainian ethnic group we diagnosed the largest number of positive correlations between: the way of the explication of compliments in a form of a sentence and: syntactic constructions (phrases); semantically related compliments formed by the way of identity; creative compliments; semantically related compliments formed by the way of logical adjectivation and: semantically related compliments formed by the way of identity; semantically related compliments formed by the way of belonging, etc. The respondents of the English ethnic group had the highest number of positive correlations between: the way of the explication of compliments in a form of phrases and: semantically similar compliments; creative compliments; emotional and evaluative compliments and: semantically related compliments formed by the way of identity; semantically related compliments formed by the way of logical adjectivation, etc.
 Conclusions. We’ll formulate the psycholinguistic features of the explication of compliments in Ukrainian and English languages. Such features are: respondents of both Ukrainian and English ethnic groups are characterized by dominated subjective (ideosyncrasic) way of forming complementary expressions. English respondents are also dominated by emotional and evaluative way, while Ukrainians – by creative way in modeling the compliments. English people are more emotional in choosing phrases, word combinations and speech patterns that are complementary expressions, their speech is characterized by expressiveness and imagery. In turn, Ukrainians are more able to form creative expressions in their content, they form associative schemes, which, on the one hand, seem illogical, but, on the other hand, contain a creative context that enriches speech in a great degree, etc.

Communicating in the Face of Racism: Infinitive v. Gerund Verbal Complements in English

As COVID-19 continues to spread across the country, Asian Americans and Asian immigrants have experienced an increase in racist attacks. This paper presents a lesson plan that is intended to help English as a Second Language (ESL) learners of East Asian origin communicate in the face of racial discrimination. In addition to outlining this teaching technique, the article provides a linguistic analysis of the lesson plan’s grammatical focus: the distinction between infinitive and gerund verbal complements. The author argues that the Bolinger Principle, a theory that articulates the reasoning behind this distinction, provides an effective and meaning-informed teaching strategy for teaching infinitives and gerunds. The purpose of the article is to offer guidance for teachers who may wish to use this form-focused technique in their own classrooms. Keywords: ESL, racism, Asian immigrants, infinitive complements, gerund complements, Bolinger Principle

Communicating in the Face of Racism: Infinitive v. Gerund Verbal Complements in English

As COVID-19 continues to spread across the country, Asian Americans and Asian immigrants have experienced an increase in racist attacks. This paper presents a lesson plan that is intended to help English as a Second Language (ESL) learners of East Asian origin communicate in the face of racial discrimination. In addition to outlining this teaching technique, the article provides a linguistic analysis of the lesson plan’s grammatical focus: the distinction between infinitive and gerund verbal complements. The author argues that the Bolinger Principle, a theory that articulates the reasoning behind this distinction, provides an effective and meaning-informed teaching strategy for teaching infinitives and gerunds. The purpose of the article is to offer guidance for teachers who may wish to use this form-focused technique in their own classrooms. Keywords: ESL, racism, Asian immigrants, infinitive complements, gerund complements, Bolinger Principle

The Impact of Grammar on Mentalizing: A Training Study Including Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Language Disorder.

Training on complements in English, German, and Mandarin has been reported to trigger improvements on both complements and Theory of Mind (ToM), with typically developing (TD) pre-schoolers on the verge of developing these skills (Hale and Tager-Flusberg, 2003; Lohmann and Tomasello, 2003; Shuliang et al., 2014). In the current study, we build on the idea that increasing mastery of complementation holds the promise of enhancing ToM, and seek (i) to replicate the positive effects observed in previous work for this effect in French-speaking TD children, and (ii) to pilot extending this to clinical children, more specifically those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), through exploring whether improvement in the latter, clinical groups follows that of the TD group. Sixty children with ToM difficulties, 16 with ASD (aged 5;6–11;8), 20 with DLD (aged 4;8–9;0) and 24 typically developing children aged (2;9–5;3 years), participated in a 4-week training program. Half received training targeting sentential complements and half received a control training targeting lexical skills. Complementation training, but not lexical training, led to a significant direct increase in complements, and also had the indirect effect of significantly boosting belief reasoning. TD and clinical groups followed the same patterns of performance. These results confirm previous findings in other languages for TD, and further suggest promising new directions for therapeutic programs addressing ToM delays in populations of different aetiologies, namely the incorporation of a motivating training on complementation.

Comparing explanatory principles of complement selection statistically: a case study based on Canadian English

ABSTRACTSeveral factors have been identified in the recent literature to explain variation in the selection of sentential complements in recent English, and the article begins with a survey of such factors. The article then offers a case study of the impact of such factors on non-finite complements of the adjective afraid on the basis of the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English. Attention is paid for instance to the Extraction and Choice Principles, passive lower predicates, and text type. Multivariate analysis is applied to compare and to shed light on such different explanatory principles. The Choice Principle proves to be by far the most significant predictor of the alternation, while the heavily correlated syntactic feature of Voice appears non-significant. Fiction, as opposed to the informative registers, shows a notable preference for to infinitives, though this finding needs to be replicated in datasets where controlling for author idiolect is possible. Theoretically plausible odds ratios are observed on the Extraction Principle and negation of the predicate, but they are not statistically significant. In the former case, this may well be due to the variable’s collinearity with the Choice Principle and its low overall frequency, resulting in a low effective sample size.

Structural priming in production through ‘silence’: An investigation of verb phrase ellipsis and null complement anaphora

There are two common competing conceptions of how ellipsis can be resolved: in the first, ellipsis is resolved by constructing unpronounced syntactic representations at the ellipsis site; in the second, ellipsis can be resolved by consulting the semantic/discourse information present in the antecedent, without the mediation of any syntax at all. In four syntactic priming experiments, we examine whether resolving English VP ellipsis and Null Complement Anaphora involves accessing the syntactic representations, or only the semantic representations, of the antecedent clause. Our findings suggest both VPE and Null Complement Anaphora can trigger structural priming effects, but the conditions under which they trigger priming are different. These results have implications for both theories of structural priming mechanism and theories of ellipsis resolution.

Acquisition without evidence: English infinitives and poverty of stimulus in adult second language acquisition

This article provides a Poverty of Stimulus argument for the participation of a dedicated linguistic module in second language acquisition. We study the second language (L2) acquisition of a subset of English infinitive complements that exhibit the following properties: (a) they present an intricate web of grammatical constraints while (b) they are highly infrequent in corpora, (c) they lack visible features that would make them salient, and (d) they are communicatively superfluous. We report on an experiment testing the knowledge of some infinitival constructions by near-native adult first language (L1) Spanish / L2 English speakers. Learners demonstrated a linguistic system that includes contrasts based on subtle restrictions in the L2, including aspect restrictions in Raising to Object. These results provide evidence that frequency and other cognitive or environmental factors are insufficient to account for the acquisition of the full spectrum of English infinitivals. This leads us to the conclusion that a domain-specific linguistic faculty is required.

On the need for a new research agenda for corpus-based translation studies: a multi-methodological, multifactorial and interdisciplinary approach

ABSTRACTTwenty-five years after the emergence of corpus-based translation studies the present paper offers a critical analysis of the current state of the art in corpus-based translation studies, focusing on what it has yielded in terms of description, methodology and theory. This analysis leads to the detection of problem areas which result in limitations to progress in the field. We argue that these limitations can be overcome, by adopting a revised research agenda for empirical translation studies, with a broader methodological scope and more theoretical awareness. At the very heart of this agenda is the description of translation as an inherently multidimensional linguistic activity and product, which is simultaneously constrained by sociocultural, technological and cognitive factors, leading ultimately to a better understanding of what translation exactly is, how it is shaped by varying circumstances, and how it relates to other types of constrained communication. The added value of this research agenda is illustrated in two case studies on optional that in English complement clause constructions.

The Great Complement Shift and the role of understood subjects: The case of fearful

Abstract This article reports on a corpus-based study of diachronic change and constructional competition in the system of English complementation, with a focus on variation in non-finite complements of the adjective fearful. Fearful occurs with prepositional (of -ing) subject-controlled gerunds and with to-infinitives, which can further be distinguished into subject extraposition, subject control, and tough-constructions. Recent decades show a drastic decline of the to-infinitival patterns, concomitant to the loss of one of the senses of fearful. We examine the diachronic distribution and competition of the two construction pairs that show functional overlap, i.e. tough-constructions and extraposition constructions on the one hand, and infinitival and gerundial subject-control patterns on the other. This allows us to show the import of the ‘Great Complement Shift’ in the face of constructional attrition and to investigate new principles motivating the choice for either the to-infinitival or the gerundial subject-control construction. More specifically, the study provides further evidence for the ‘Choice Principle’, which involves the (lack of) agentivity of the understood subject in the event described by the lower clause. In this way, the study adds new explanatory factors and descriptive insights to our knowledge of the broader diachronic change known as the Great Complement Shift.

Exploring <i>if/whether</i> variation in subordinate interrogatives<sup>1</sup>

This paper investigates the variation between if and whether (e.g. I don’t know if / whether you are right ), since prior studies on complementation in English have not sufficiently addressed the variation between these two complementizers, and those examining if -clauses have centred the analysis around conditionality. Based on data extracted from the British component of the International Corpus of English , the results from the study show that although if and whether are mostly interchangeable complementizers, there are grammatical, semantic and stylistic constraints regarding the choice of conjunction. The results suggest that a number of factors can influence the choice of complementizer, such as the matrix verb or the presence of an explicit alternative in clause introduced by the conjunction or . In addition, extralinguistic factors such as age and gender are also revealed as playing a role in the choice of complementizer.

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

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.