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
pectual differences, contrasts in relative temporal deixis, presupposition and implication, or the potentiality —performance dichotomy expressed by the respective clause types. But, as I have already observed early in this paper, some of the alternative hypotheses that have been presented either make empirically discordant predictions or fall short of offering a complete account for the relevant set of facts that is formulated in syntactic and semantic or pragmatic categories and principles that achieve a degree of generality which can induce such a set of statements to be viewed as a convincing explanation which can be incorporated in a grammar that is meant to be a psychologically relevant model of the native speaker's language competence. In what follows I will present the outlines of an alternative, and perhaps more general, hypothesis as an attempt to account for the distribution of infinitival and ing clause complements in English. The hypothesis I am going to present will be supported both by arguments derived from theoretical considerations and by empirical evidence. Some of the empirical evidence to be presented will be independent (and therefore of great value) in that it comes from a totally unrelated but surprisingly relevant area of English. Since basically any theory of meaning in natural language seeks to establish, among other things, the principles which bring into correspondence units of meaning with units of syntactic structure, it is crucial that an adequate model of the native speaker's knowledge of meaning account for the way locutions of varying complexity identify the semantic or ontological entities to which they correspond. In set theoretical terms, to identify an entity entails presupposing a set in which that entity is a member as well as distinguishing this member from any and all other members of the same set From this it follows that the identification of an element in a set implies the contrasts that distinguish the particular element from all other members of that set The set itself will be identified by the property or properties that are shared by all its members. If the elements of semantic structure to which linguistic expressions correspond are viewed as set theoretical entities, i.e., elements in sets, it is clear that the understanding of implied contrasts between a particular ele20
