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Watching English grammar change: a case study on complement selection in British and American English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2006

JUHANI RUDANKO
JUHANI RUDANKO
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Tampere, PO Box 607, Tampere FIN 33101, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article traces the complement selection properties of the adjective accustomed from the eighteenth century to the present. The adjective has frequently selected sentential complements, but the study illustrates a major change affecting the form of such complements. In the eighteenth century they were regularly of the to infinitive type, but today they are almost as regularly of the to -ing type. Both syntactic and semantic factors are identified in the article as having an impact on the change. The study also compares the pace of the change in British and American English, arguing that incipient change was discernible in both varieties as early as the nineteenth century. It is argued further that, at the present time, the change has been completed more fully in American English than in British English. This conclusion is reached by considering sentences with extraction or filler–gap dependencies. The data in the article come from large electronic corpora.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , May 2006 , pp. 31 - 48
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2006

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Footnotes

The author is grateful to Rudolph C. Troike, of the University of Arizona, for commenting on an early version of this article. Further, he is indebted to Ian Gurney, of the University of Tampere, for commenting on the next-to-final version and to Robert Cooper, likewise of the University of Tampere, for helping with some final revisions. Readers for the publisher likewise provided valuable suggestions. All remaining shortcomings are solely the author's responsibility.