9 - The in -ing construction in British English, 1800–2000

Summary

Defining in -ing complements

In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in issues of complementation, generated in large part by the increasing availability of new electronic corpora. Some of this work has had a purely synchronic focus on Present-day English, but there has also been renewed attention paid to diachronic aspects of the system of English predicate complementation, and how it has developed over time (see also Mair, this volume). The present article offers a contribution to the latter area of research and takes up a particular aspect of verb complementation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the basis of corpus evidence, in order to investigate stability and change in this part of English grammar.

Consider sentence (1), taken from the Bank of English Corpus:

(1) The Titans delight in upsetting the odds, […]

(Times/UK)

The pattern of sentence (1) essentially involves the preposition in and a following -ing clause. (The term ‘clause’ is used here to refer to a subordinate sentence.) Adopting the label first introduced in Rudanko (1991) and also used for instance in Francis et al. (1996: 194–5), the pattern may be called a type of the in -ing pattern. The particular in -ing pattern in question is the one where the pattern is associated with a matrix verb, as with delight in sentence (1).

There are a number of properties of the in -ing pattern as illustrated in sentence (1) that should be emphasized here.