Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T22:53:30.325Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The choice between infinitives and that-clauses after believe1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Dirk Noël
Dirk Noël
Affiliation:
Department of EnglishUniversity of GentRozier 44B-9000 [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Intuitive, sentence-based approaches have so far failed to account conclusively for the choice between a that-complement and an infinitival complement after believe-type verbs, in sentences like I believe something like this to be very much the case (EB2 1297) and I believe that monetary union is political union, and that the creation of a single currency is federalism (HHW 13012). Syntactically, there is no free variation between the two patterns, since there are a number of formal restrictions on the infinitival complements that do not apply to the that-complements. But is there a semantic motivation behind the choice in cases when there are no formal reasons for choosing one or the other? This paper surveys a few earlier suggestions to this effect, but argues that a corpus-based approach unmistakably suggests that factors of a textual nature are at work, rather than purely semantic ones.2

Type
Articles
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , November 1997 , pp. 271 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bolinger, D. L. (1952). Linear modification. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 67: 1117–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borkin, A. (1973). To be and not to be. In Corum, C., Smith-Stark, T. C. & Weiser, A. (eds.), Papers from the ninth regional meeting. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 44–56.Google Scholar
Borkin, A. (1974). Raising to object position. (= University of Michigan Papers in Linguistics 2, 1.) University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Borkin, A. (1984). Problems in form and function. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Burnard, L. (1995). Users' reference guide for the British National Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Computing Services.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. L. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and points of view. In Li, C. N. (ed.) Subject and topic. New York: Academic Press. 26–56.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. L. (1987). Cognitive constraints on information flow. In Tomlin, R. S. (ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 21–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W. (1991). A new approach to English grammar, on semantic principles. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W. (1995). Complement clauses and complementation strategies. In Palmer, F. (ed.), Grammar and meaning: essays in honour of Sir John Lyons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 175–220.Google Scholar
Duffley, P. J. (1992). The English infinitive. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Firbas, J. (1967). On the interplay of means of functional sentence perspective. Proceedings of the international congress of linguists 10: 740–5.Google Scholar
Firbas, J. (1992). Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Francis, G., Hunston, S. & Manning, E. (1996). Collins COBUILD grammar patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Givón, T. (1983). Introduction. In Givón, T. (ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: a quantitative cross-language study. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L.(eds.), Syntax and semantics, 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press. 41–58.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. (1967). Notes on transitivity and theme in English, part 2. Journal of Linguistics 3: 199–244.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Kuno, S. (1972). Functional sentence perspective: a case study from English and Japanese. Linguistic Inquiry 3: 269–320.Google Scholar
Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of cognitive grammar, Vol. 2: Descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mair, C. (1990). Infinitival complement clauses in English: a study of syntax in discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mair, C. (1993). A crosslinguistic functional constraint on believe-type raising in English and selected other European languages. Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 28: 5–19.Google Scholar
Mann, W. C., Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. & Thompson, S. A. (1992). Rhetorical Structure Theory and text analysis. In Mann, W. C. & Thompson, S. A. (eds.), Discourse description: Diverse linguistic analyses of a fund-raising text. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 39–78.Google Scholar
Mann, W. C. & Thompson, S. A. (1986). Relational propositions in discourse. Discourse Processes 9: 57–90.Google Scholar
Matthiessen, C. & Thompson, S. A. (1988). The structure of discourse and ‘subordination’. In Haiman, J. & Thompson, S. A. (eds.), Clause combining in grammar and discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 275–329.Google Scholar
Maxwell, M. B. (1984). The subject and infinitival complementation in English. Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington.Google Scholar
Noël, D. (1989). The study of coherence relations: What is wrong with it and how it can be improved upon. Interface 3: 137–45.Google Scholar
Noël, D. (1990). Coherence relations and mental models. Linguistica Antverpiensia 24: 149–59.Google Scholar
Noël, D. (in preparation). Infinitives vs. that-clauses after believe-type verbs.Google Scholar
Noonan, M. (1985). Complementation. In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description II: Complex constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 42–140.Google Scholar
Prince, E. F. (1981). Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Cole, P. (ed.), Radical pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Riddle, E. (1975). Some pragmatic conditions on complementizer choice. In Grossman, R. E., San, L. J. & Vance, T. J. (eds.), Papers from the eleventh regional meeting. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 467–74.Google Scholar
Steever, S. B. (1977). Raising, meaning, and conversational implicature. In Beach, W. A., Fox, S. E. & Philosoph, S. (eds.), Papers from the thirteenth regional meeting. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 590–602.Google Scholar
Thompson, S. A. & Mulac, A. (1991). A quantitative perspective on the grammaticization of epistemic parentheticals in English. In Traugott, E. & Heine, B. (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 313–29.Google Scholar
Ureland, S. (1973). Verb complementation in Swedish and other Germanic languages. Stockholm: Skriptor.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, A. (1988). The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar