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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 ...

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. In this introduction, we set out the central themes of the special issue. It concentrates on imperfect function-form mappings, and discusses several cases in which specific perspectival meanings are not fully predictable on the basis of a perspectivizing grammatical construction alone. We distinguish two kinds of form-function mismatches: (1) perspective-persistent phenomena, i.e. grammatically signaled ...

This paper sheds new light on the status of the fact that-clauses as a diagnostic alternation of factive that-clauses, which are traditionally defined as presupposed true by the speaker. It does so by tracing their diachronic sense development and shifting distribution in Late Modern English. The analysis shows that in early uses, the fact that-clauses were predominantly used in contexts in which require overtly nominalised form of the clause ...

Ever since Kiparsky & Kiparsky's (1970) seminal paper, it has been recognized that the English complementation system makes a distinction between factive complements (e.g. He doesn't like John's nomination for the award/that John was nominated for the award.) and reported complements (e.g. He said ?John's nomination for the award/He said that John was nominated for the award.) However, the semantico-functional motivation for this distinction ...

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the English object extraposition construction, which involves the anticipation of a complement clause by an expletive pronoun it in object position, as in he’ll appreciate it that you’ve taken the time to return his book. In the existing literature, the presence or absence of anticipatory it has been associated with interpretive differences in terms of the givenness and/or presupposition of the ...