Infinitival Complements Research Articles

When Conversation Is Not Enough

Children with language impairment have been found to show limited usage of infinitival complements, one of the earliest complex sentence types to emerge and a significant form in school-age language. Children’s production of infinitival complements in conversation is not sufficient to tell us what they know about this form. This article describes a story completion procedure for eliciting infinitival complements. The procedure includes 2 situational contexts requiring different infinitive sentence forms and a variety of verbs with which infinitival complements can be produced. The child’s response includes both production of an utterance to complete each story and then an acting out of the meaning of that utterance. This enables the examiner to look not only at the forms produced by the child but also at the relationship between form and meaning.

English prototyped small clauses in the interlanguage of Chinese/Taiwanese adult learners

This study of consider and find attempts to shed light on second language acquisition of English small clause complements, as in we consider [Mary intelligent] and we find [Mary interesting]. It examines how learners’ First language (Mandarin Chinese) interacts with the target language. The analysis is based on the results of two kinds of tasks: grammaticality judgements, intended to elicit nonnative participants’ implicit knowledge as compared with the responses of native participants; and oral translations to test their explicit access to this knowledge. The results indicate that Chinese learners tend to avoid sentences that contain small clause complements. A related finding is that, like small clause complements, infinitival complements are under-generated and not preferred by the subjects; tensed clauses and clauses introduced by that are preferred. It is suggested that learners’ difficulty with small clause complements involves underlying first language transfer. On the other hand, the difficulty with infinitive clauses may be related to universal developmental order, as the interpretation for an NP involves an extra mechanism, Exceptional Case Marking.

The indo-European mini est construction in Slavic

This article deals with the transformation of the Indo-European possessive construction Nom (possessum) + *jestb + Dat (possessor) in Slavic. This construction is attested in Old Church Slavonic and Old Serbian, together with a new type of possessive predication with the verb "have". It also exists in Old Russian, where a new structure with i + Gen was introduced early on. In the later development of Slavic languages it disappears or becomes obsolete, with the reanalysis of the dative into a possessive adnominal. If a noun denoting physical or emotional state was possessum, it was reanalyzed in Slavic languages as a predicative of a new impersonal construction where the dative denotes an experiencer. If this possessive construction had an infinitive complement, it was reanalyzed as a modal construction *jestb + [Dat + Inf]. So, Dat + Inf occupies the subject position and the dative becomes the logical subject of the infinitive action. This process started in the period of Old Church Slavonic and was completed by the time the first Slavic vernacular documents appeared. This analysis shows that one of the important reasons for syntactic change is the change of a language type, in this case, the change of the esse- to the habeo-type. Archaic esse-structures became incompatible with the dominant nominative language type, so they either disappeared or changed into modal or impersonal structures.

Verbos y construcciones causativas analíticas en portugués y en español

When a causative meaning is expressed by an independent verbal element, we may identify the construction as analytic, periphrastic, or syntactic. Romance languages present greater grammatical elaboration of analytic causative constructions than other languages. Contradicting a long formalist (generative) tradition in general (and Romance) linguistics, the grammatical complexity of the causative constructions becomes explicable in the light of their semantic import and conceptual motivations. This paper offers a conceptual analysis of the analytic causative constructions in Portuguese and in Spanish. We will begin with a survey of the semantic properties of the causative verbs. Based on the Talmy's (1988, 2000) force dynamics model, four force-dynamic patterns are described, which are instantiated in fazer/hacer 'do/make', manter/mantener 'keep' and deixar/dejar 'leave/let'. Other analytic causative verbs such as mandar 'order', forçar/forzar 'force', obrigar/obligar 'oblige', and levar/llevar 'lead', are considered. After that, we go on to analyze the grammar of the four main causative constructions in Portuguese and in Spanish, namely infinitival, finite, reflexive and resultative constructions. The conceptual factors (or imagery, Langacker, 1987, 1991) of the three infinitival complement constructions of Portuguese arc briefly analyzed, which represent a more elaborate continuum of event integration and of causer autonomy and causer control. Finally, we briefly describe the compatibilities between the verbs and constructions, and include a reference to the alternative construction with the finite complement, and to the causative-reflexive and causative-resultative constructions.

Production of infinitives by 5-year-old children with language-impairment on an elicitation task

The infinitive productions of eight 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) on an elicited production task were compared with the infinitive productions of 25 3- to 5-year-old children with normally-developing language (NL). The basic infinitive structure itself did not seem to be a problem for these children since all eight of the children with SLI produced infinitival complements with at least five different main verbs. However, other aspects of infinitive sentences which must be learned as a lexical property of specific verbs appeared to present more difficulty for some of the children with SLI. Individual children with SLI showed limited or no subcategorization for ditransitivity (production of both an NP and an infinitival complement) or for infinitives with a lexical complement subject. In contrast to previous reports, only one of the children with SLI omitted the infinitive marker to more than once. Reference errors were consistent with what has previously been reported for NL children.

L’analyse des constructions du verbe venir avec l’infinitif

Summary The object of this paper is to explore the constructions of the French verb venir with a infinitival complement, through the analysis of a large corpus. We conclude that differences between verbs and auxiliaries are a matter of degree. Contrary to the cases of the movement verb venir (Table 2 in M. Gross, 1975, ex. Pierre est venu voir Marie), the subject, in some constructions of «venir + infinitive» is an inanimate noun. We propose to distinguish, among the constructions mentioned above, the aspectual use of venir (ex. Cet incident est venu compliquer encore la question). This use of venir is to be analyzed as an intermediate state between movement verbs and auxiliaries. In this aspectual construction, whose subject can be caracterized as an abstract noun, the verb venir does not take a locative complement, contrary to any other constructions of «venir + infinitive» (with the exception of the auxiliary use venir de). Such aspectual constructions do not exist with the verb aller, the counterpart deictic verb of venir. If venir in aspectual use is on the way to becoming an auxiliary, aller without this use can be considered as more advanced in the axe of auxiliarity.

The effect of context on the processing of type-shifting verbs

Recent research in lexical semantics has suggested that verbs such as begin and enjoy semantically select for a complement that denotes an activity or an event. When no such activity or event is specified in the form of a progressive or infinitival complement, as in John began ( to read/reading) the book, the verb is said to “coerce” the NP direct object to shift its role to encompass the activity that begin requires as complement (e.g., writing, reading). Empirical support for this view has been provided by McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, & Jackendoff (2001). In the present study, however, in two self-paced reading experiments, type-shifting effects (taken to be longer reading times engendered by the computation of the coercion process) were not obtained with sentences in isolation (Experiment 1) or with sentences embedded in contexts that specified the nature of the activity performed over the complement NP (Experiment 2). It is argued that type-shifting verbs are similar to non-preferred verbs for given contexts and that type-shifting operations are pragmatic inferences computed over underspecified semantic representations.

On Reflexive Binding in North Sami

Principle A of the Binding Theory states that an anaphor must be A-bound in the local domain containing it, its governor and an accessible subject. However, if the anaphor is contained in an infinitival complement clause, it may, in North Sami, be bound either by the clause-mate subject or by the subject of the tensed clause. Thus, it appears that there is a larger binding domain for anaphors in addition to that determined by the condition A of standard binding theory. This domain can in some languages, as in North Sami, be defined by the notion of Tense whereas in other languages this need not be case, as in English. This supports the approach that the characterization of binding domains is parameterized and that languages pick different values of the parameter.

Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure (review)

Reviewed by: Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure Asya Pereltsvaig Susanne Wurmbrand . Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure. In the series Studies in Generative Grammar 55. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2001. Pp. x + 371. US$55 (paperback). This book is a revised version of Susanne Wurmbrand's doctoral dissertation. It investigates a range of infinitival constructions focusing mostly on German; other languages considered include English, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. The main aim of the book is to account for the gamut of variation in syntactic behaviour and semantic interpretation among different infinitival structures. Previous literature on the subject discusses cases where infinitival complement clauses appear to be transparent domains for syntactic phenomena that are otherwise clause-bound and those where infinitival complement clauses are as opaque as finite clauses. It has also been observed that infinitival clauses may or may not receive a variable interpretation for the understood infinitival subject and may or may not permit a tense interpretation distinct from that of the matrix clause. In order to explain these sorts of facts, Wurmbrand proposes to elaborate the two-way distinction found in the previous literature between restructuring and non-restructuring infinitival clauses. According to her, the so-called "restructuring" phenomenon should be split into two subclasses—lexical and functional restructuring—and non-restructuring infinitives should be subdivided into full clausal non-restructuring and reduced non-restructuring. Hence, she proposes a four-way distinction where each type of infinitive corresponds to a certain type of functional architecture above the VP: in lexical restructuring the infinitival is a VP, in functional restructuring it is the main predicate (i.e., a vP), in reduced non-restructuring it is a vP or a TP, and in full clausal non-restructuring it is a CP. It is furthermore claimed that "differences in the syntactic structure among different classes of infinitival complement clauses correspond closely (though not perfectly) to differences in interpretation" (pp. 1-2). As for the question of what determines which class a certain infinitive belongs to, Wurmbrand shows that the class of restructuring predicates is characterised by uniform syntactic properties, but maintains that "the semantics of a configuration is not sufficient to determine whether a construction allows or disallows restructuring" (p. 9). Consider restructuring infinitives first. One of the crucial issues concerning restructuring is how much functional architecture is included in a restructuring infinitive. There are two main types of approaches to this issue in the literature: bi-clausal and mono-clausal. According to bi-clausal approaches, restructuring infinitives are derived from larger non-restructuring infinitives by structure changing operations (e.g., pruning, restructuring, or reanalysis), head movement, topicalisation, or some combination thereof. Under mono-clausal approaches restructuring infinitives are not derived from non-restructuring infinitives but are generated with less than the full array of functional projections on top of the VP (or just the VP itself, as in the case of lexical restructuring infinitives). Wurmbrand considers the two types of approaches and concludes that "a mono-clausal approach is empirically and conceptually superior since it explains and predicts a range of correlations between the syntactic and semantic properties of restructuring contexts"; biclausal approaches, according to her, "involve various unmotivated assumptions that question the explanatory value of these approaches" (p. 10). Crucially for Wurmbrand, restructuring infinitives do not project INFL- or COMP-type functional categories. This accounts for their syntactic behaviour and semantic interpretation. [End Page 125] Thus, "restructuring infinitives denote bare events or actions—i.e., predicates that lack any kind of propositional or force properties (such as tense, complementizers, and negation)" (p. 17). Furthermore, it is shown that restructuring infinitives lack an embedded syntactic subject (i.e., PRO), which would be introduced by vo. In addition, she argues that restructuring infinitives also lack a structural object case position (e.g., AgrOP). The latter proposal about the structure of restructuring infinitives explains a range of phenomena, such as "long passive" in German, Italian, and Spanish, easy-to-please constructions, and case-assignment in Japanese infinitival constructions. Furthermore, Wurmbrand shows that true restructuring infinitives are tenseless; "as soon as the infinitive involves its own tense specification (i.e., tense features or operator, or before/after relation), the structure blocks...

Conceptual structure modulates structural priming in the production of complex sentences

Speakers tend to reproduce syntactic structures that they have recently comprehended or produced. This structural or syntactic priming occurs despite differences in the particular conceptual or event roles expressed in prime and target sentences ( Bock & Loebell, 1990). In two sentence recall studies, we used the tendency of speakers to paraphrase the finite complements of object-raising verbs as infinitive complements (e.g., “John believed that Mary was nice” as “John believed Mary to be nice”) to test whether an additional conceptual role would affect priming. Prime constructions with identical constituent orders as object-raising infinitives but an additional conceptual role (“John persuaded Mary to be nice”) resulted in fewer paraphrases. Contrasts with other constructions suggest that the critical difference between primes was this extra conceptual role. Thus, subtle differences in conceptual structures can affect how speakers grammatically encode message elements.

The Topic of Small Clauses

This article proposes that understanding the syntax and semantics of small clauses (SCs) requires understanding their topic structure. The article focuses on two observations: (a) the lack of passive for verbs that take bare infinitival complements and (b) the lack of a narrow scope interpretation for subjects raised from adjectival SCs. It shows that with bare infinitival complements, the subject of the SC is not the topic; this contrasts with adjectival SCs, where the subject must be a topic. The differences between verbal and adjectival SCs then follow. Finally, the article compares raising verbs with adjectival SC complements and raising verbs with infinitival complements, showing again that the differences in the syntax and semantics of such constructions are related to whether or not the subject of the embedded clause must be a topic.

Der Fokus im Mittelfeld

In this article a proposal is made for the treatment of a construction which is known under the terminus "verschrnkte Konstruktion" (Kvam 1982); it includes the so called "third construction". Example (1) shows a sentence with a syntactic complement of an infinite verb standing before the governing finite verb: (1) The proposal is made that the NP on the "wrong" place (in (1) it is the indirect object dir) is a focus in the middlefield ("Mittelfeldfokus"). In the framework of the transformational grammar of Semantic Syntax (Seuren 1996) the sentence-predicate "VATTR" is assumed which is responsible for the filling of the middlefield-position (2) a and is responsible for topicalisation, too: b This uniform syntactic treatment of topicalisation and the filling of the focus-position in the middlefield corresponds to the functional similarities of both positions. The focus is the part of the sentence which can contain the new information (Geilfu 1991) and the filling of the focus-position ("Fokussierung") is a means to make prominent a certain part of the sentence with the background of common information in the discourse of speaker and hearer. It is proposed in this article that the constructions in question are not-coherent in the sense of Bech (1983). For a sentence like (2)a no form of raising has to be assumed. The infinite embedded sentence is extraposed: no union of matrix-sentence and infinite complement has taken place.

Verbes de «mouvement» à complémentation infinitive en polonais contemporain

Summary Verbs of “movement” in the infinitive complement in contemporary Polish: comparison with other languages In this article we analyse the syntactic properties of the infinitive complement (“locative”) which appears after verbs of “movement” (Vmt) in contemporary Polish. Many of these properties are identical to properties of the infinitive complement (V-inf W) the verbs of “movement” in French and in other languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean). However, some properties are specific to the Polish construction No Vmt V-inf W.

Saute ça / “Jump this!”

Do young Bengali-speaking children learning French as a second language at preschool follow the same developmental path as French first language children with respect to the acquisition of the French faire faire causative? As an initial step toward answering this question, a flexible semi-structured play protocol was developed for the elicitation of the faire faire causative from both first and second language learners. In the first part of the study, longitudinal data were collected from eight monolingual children acquiring French as a first language in Montreal. The children were audio- and video-taped in their homes for 30 to 45 minutes every two to four weeks for at least six months, and their data were analyzed for occurrences of causative constructions, such as Je fais sauter la grenouille , and single-agent infinitival complement constructions such as Je veux jouer in which the same argument (agent or actor) applies to both modal and infinitive. Causative constructions are double-agent; the grammatical subject of the sentence (and semantic agent of the verb faire ) and the grammatical object of faire (and semantic agent of the following infinitive) are two distinct arguments. The argument structure of causative constructions is therefore more complex than that of single-agent infinitival complement constructions. Both kinds of constructions emerged at the same time in the speech of the French-L1 children, sometime between the second and fourth birthdays. In the second part of the study, cross-sectional data from 24 Bengali-L1 children aged 5 and 6 were analyzed. A standardized measure of receptive vocabulary in French was taken from each L2 child, as well as a 30-minute naturalistic speech sample incorporating the causative elicitation procedure. The L2 children's receptive vocabulary and their ability to form single-agent infinitival complement constructions resembled that of the 2and 3-year-old French monolingual children, but their ability to form causative constructions lagged far behind. Some possible explanations for this finding are suggested. Differences in the input to the two groups, aspects of the syntax of causativization in French, and first language influence may all be implicated.

The passive matrices of English infinitival complement clauses

English verbs of the believe type, which display variation between that-complements and infinitival complements, more often combine with infinitives as passives than as actives. Though there are good information/thematic structural reasons for this (Noël 1998b), the higher frequency of passive matrices could also be a concomitant of a grammaticalization process as a result of which (some of) these matrices are turning into auxiliary-like evidentials. Anderson’s (1986) four-part definition of true (grammaticalized) evidentials is used to establish whether they can qualify as such. The fact that passives are more tolerant of lexical (even dynamic) infinitives than actives (which prefer be and statives) is adduced as evidence of grammaticalization. Individual instances of the passive pattern are differentiated using three criteria of grammaticalization: frequency, expansion and intraparadigmatic variability.

La préposition en français et en espagnol : une question de grammaticalisation ?

The aim of the paper is to compare prepositional phrases in French and Spanish which correspond either to an infinitival complement or to an oblique complement clause. The central empirical observation is that French basically uses two prepositions to introduce this type of complement, viz. à and de, whereas Spanish has a larger scale of prepositions that fulfill the same function, viz. a, de, рог, con, en. The claim is that grammaticalization theory, usually put forward to deal with historical data, can also account for comparative data as those discussed here, since French prepositions display several signs of a grammaticalization process, which their Spanish correspondants lack.

The Syntax of putea and its Mixed Typology

Abstract. This paper investigates the syntax of the Romanian modal putea, which exhibits two selectional options in free alternation: an infinitive complement, as in equivalent Romance constructions, and a subjunctive complement, as in equivalent Balkan constructions. The tests show that both derivations qualify as configurations with clause union, although the syntactic mechanism for achieving the clause union may differ: subjunctive complements conform to the tense triggered pattern for biclausal union, as generally accepted in current studies; whereas bare infinitive complements reveal a parallel pattern yielding monoclausal structures ("tight" verb restructuring). The uniform treatment of modal constructions as configurations with verb restructuring demonstrates that the lexical properties of the modal verb remain constant across the syntactic variation, and this reduces the typological differences between Romance and Balkan languages.

The structures of the to-infinitive

This article presents an approach to the English to-infinitive where to is a preposition with a bare infinitive complement and ECM and object control complements receive a small clause analysis. Crucial to this approach is the positioning of PRO, which always occurs in the subject position of to's complement. This positioning allows a complementary distribution of PRO, lexical NPs, and NP-trace. The distribution of these elements, in conjunction with the small clause approach, creates multiple advantages including the elimination of current inconsistencies in the theory of null case, the reduction of control to anaphoric binding, and a general and uniform theory of complementation.

American English usage frequencies for noun phrase and tensed sentence complement-taking verbs.

The present research documents the American English usage frequencies for 136 verbs that occur with noun phrase and tensed sentence complements (e.g., accepted, noun phrase complement: The student knew the answer yesterday, tensed sentence complement: The student knew the answer was correct). This class of verbs has been the focus of numerous empirical studies investigating how syntactic ambiguity is resolved during language comprehension (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997; Holmes, Stowe, & Cupples, 1989; Kennedy, Murray, Jennings, & Reid, 1989; Kennison, 1995; Rayner & Frazier, 1987; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993). The frequencies for noun phrase complements, tensed sentence complements, prepositional phrase complements, infinitival complements, and other usages are provided, as well as the frequencies with which specific verbs occur with the overt complementizer that in tensed sentence complements.

Psych-adjectives and semantic selection

A puzzling generalization, first noted by Faraci (1974), states that (non-causative) psychological adjectives tolerate at most a subject gap in their infinitival complement whereas non-psychological adjectives require exactly one gap (either subject or object). This paper argues that the generalization follows from the fact that the infinitive is a (propositional) argument of a psych adjective but a (predicative) modifier of a non-psych adjective. A series of tests (ellipsis, extraction, extraposition and P-stranding) confirms this asymmetry. A-bar binding is responsible for both subject-gap complements to non-psych adjectives and subject-gap infinitival relatives, explaining their crosslinguistic correlation. This strongly suggests that obligatory control does not fall under operator-abstraction, as argued by predicational treatments of control, but rather involves a different mechanism.