Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)
STUDIES - Csaba Czeglédi: On the Distribution of Infinitival and Gerundive Complements in English
Chomsky (1981), and much other work inspired by GB, these structures are analyzed as embedded sentences. Koster and May (1982) address the issue directly in an influential article, where they provide a detailed comparison of the predictions the VP hypothesis and the S-bar hypothesis make, and they conclude that infinitives —and as the analysis extends readily to gerunds, they too —are sentences in English. It is interesting to note that in Maxwell's (1984) proposal, which is intermediate in a sense between the VP hypothesis and the S' hypothesis, infinitives and gerunds are treated differently. He argues that gerunds but not infinitives are sentences in English. Parallel to the problem of constituency in syntax we have the property versus proposition dilemma in semantics. Syntactically nonfinite expressions may be VPs or S's, and semantically they may correspond either to properties or to propositions. Chierchia (1984:215—6) observes that in principle there can be, and in fact there are, four different views on this matter. Nonfinite complements might be analyzed syntactically as VPs and semantically they might correspond to properties. This is Chierchia's (1984) own view as well as the general assumption in standard Montague Grammar, on which Chierchia's "VP = P(roperty)' hypothesis is based. As a variant of this, nonfinite complements could be VPs which semantically correspond to open propositions. Alternatively, nonfinite constructions might be syntactically clausal, and semantically they may be associated with properties. Finally, as in Chomsky (1981), Koster and May (1982) and much other GB based work, nonfinite complements can be analyzed as S's which correspond to propositions in semantic structure. I cannot take up these highly complex issues here, and for the purposes of this paper I will simply assume that nonfinite complements are sentences and that semantically they are associated with propositions. The problem of distribution The second fundamental issue is how to account for the distribution of infinitives and gerunds in English. It is familiar that the occurrence of untensed complements is restricted in various ways. The crux of the problem here is whether the distribution of nonfinite complement clauses is deter12
