Book contents
- Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax
- Studies in English Language
- Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Analysing English Syntax Past and Present
- Part I Approaches to Grammatical Categories and Categorial Change
- Part II Approaches to Constructions and Constructional Change
- Chapter 6 How Patterns Spread: The To-Infinitival Complement as a Case of Diffusional Change, or ‘To-Infinitives, and Beyond!’
- Chapter 7 Me Liketh/Lotheth but I Loue/Hate: Impersonal/Non-Impersonal Boundaries in Old and Middle English
- Chapter 8 That’s Luck, If You Ask Me: The Rise of an Intersubjective Comment Clause
- Chapter 9 Misreading and Language Change: A Foray into Qualitative Historical Linguistics
- Chapter 10 The Conjunction and in Phrasal and Clausal Structures in the Old Bailey Corpus
- Part III Comparative and Typological Approaches
- References
- Index
Chapter 6 - How Patterns Spread: The To-Infinitival Complement as a Case of Diffusional Change, or ‘To-Infinitives, and Beyond!’
from Part II - Approaches to Constructions and Constructional Change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2019
- Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax
- Studies in English Language
- Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Analysing English Syntax Past and Present
- Part I Approaches to Grammatical Categories and Categorial Change
- Part II Approaches to Constructions and Constructional Change
- Chapter 6 How Patterns Spread: The To-Infinitival Complement as a Case of Diffusional Change, or ‘To-Infinitives, and Beyond!’
- Chapter 7 Me Liketh/Lotheth but I Loue/Hate: Impersonal/Non-Impersonal Boundaries in Old and Middle English
- Chapter 8 That’s Luck, If You Ask Me: The Rise of an Intersubjective Comment Clause
- Chapter 9 Misreading and Language Change: A Foray into Qualitative Historical Linguistics
- Chapter 10 The Conjunction and in Phrasal and Clausal Structures in the Old Bailey Corpus
- Part III Comparative and Typological Approaches
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter revisits my earlier work on to-infinitives (Los 1999, 2005) in the light of the new insights about the spread of complementation patterns provided by De Smet (2013) and Rudanko (2015). Their investigations into the spread of the gerund as a verb complement benefited from the fact that the gerund came into existence relatively recently, which made it possible not only to construct a scenario of how it spread through the system of verbal complementation, but also to date the various stages.
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- Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax , pp. 149 - 169Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019