Article published in:
Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns
Edited by Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière and Lieven Vandelanotte
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 63] 2014
► pp. 223–238

A new angle on infinitival and of -ing complements of afraid, with evidence 
from the TIME Corpus

| University of Tampere
This article argues that an approach based on semantic roles offers a new approach to the variation between to infinitival and of -ing complements of the adjective afraid. While the semantic role of the higher subject does not appear to vary, control theory makes it possible to investigate the semantic role of the lower subject. No absolute rules can be given, but regularities that are of statistical significance can be observed. The study draws on the first three decades of the TIME Corpus for authentic data. The results shed light on the semantic interpretation of to infinitival and -ing complements in subject control constructions and open a new perspective on the relevance of semantic roles to argument selection.
Published online: 14 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.63.16rud
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