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In: Valentin Werner, Elena Seoane and Cristina Suárez Gómez (eds.) (2016) Re-assessing the present perfect (Topics in English Linguistics, 91), pp. 43–94., 2016
The English to-infinitival perfect (as in She claims to have seen him) has not received the same attention as the present perfect. In this paper we examine its changing use in written American English over the last 200 years, using data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). This reveals a reduction of about 80% over this period, against a baseline of other past-referring forms (present perfect and past tense verbs). Secondly, we examine contexts of decline, focusing on the most frequent verb collocates of the to-infinitival perfect in COHA (such as CLAIM in the example above) on the premise that these collocates identify the semantic contexts in which the to-infinitival perfect may be used. Collocates are divided into subgroups based on semantic and grammatical criteria, including possible alternation patterns to the to-infinitival perfect. This procedure exposes a rich variation in the behaviour of both subgroups and individual verbs.
In: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.) (2012) The Oxford handbook of the history of English. New York: Oxford University Press. 200-210.
English modality: core, periphery and evidentiality, 2013
In: Elena Seoane, Carlos Acuña-Fariña and Ignacio Palacios-Martínez (eds.) Subordination in English: synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Topics in English Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter. 129-154., 2018
UCL Historically, the English gerund is an action noun which, from the Middle English period onwards, could gradually also be used as a verb (Jack 1988, Fanego 1996a/b, 1998, 2004). In Present-Day English the reflexes of this development are, on the one hand, verbal nouns heading noun phrases, as in [The deliberate sinking of the ship] was a criminal act, and, on the other hand, verbs heading clausal structures, as in [The navy deliberately sinking the ship] was a criminal act. The heads of these bracketed constructions are called gerunds in many grammars, despite the differences between them, e.g. the fact that in the second example sinking licenses a subject and an object. In this paper we study the distribution of the second type of structure in PDE – which we call –ing clauses – taking into account the dependents the verb takes, the functions that the clause as a whole can perform, and how their use and frequency has changed over recent decades. We use the data we obtain to contribute to the question of whether the label 'gerund' still has a role to play in the grammar of English. Our findings show that over the time period 1960–1990, –ing clauses functioning as direct object and as adverbial increasingly tend to contain an explicit subject. We argue that this suggests that –ing clauses have tended to become more clausal over time in spoken British English. We use the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day English (DCPSE) as our dataset.
The English Verb Phrase, 2013
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