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

(29) Many people eat in restaurants in London, vs. 'Many people eat at home in London'/etc. This is confirmed by Quirk et al.'s (1985:519—20) observation that only the sentence adjunct can be fronted: (30) a. In London, many people eat in restaurants, b. *In restaurants, many people eat in London. These facts show that certain classes of adverbials differ systematically as to what kind of implicational sets they trigger in sentences and thus they provide independent evidence from an area of English grammar totally unrelated to nonfinite sentence embedding which supports the general hypothesis that certain types of implied contrasts are systematically expressed in English by specific grammatical devices and that the indication of particular types of implied contrasts is an important aspect of both syntactic and semantic structure. The proposed implicational generalizations illustrated above may be easily extended to nonfinite sentential complements. The specific form the general hypothesis will now take is that infinitival complement clauses and -ing clauses differ as to what kind of implicit contrasts they trigger. I will try to show, in particular, that infinitival complements trigger implicit contrasts between the proposition expressed in the matrix clause and its negation or opposite, keeping, remarkably, the entity denoted by the matrix subject and the event described in the complement clause constant Thus, the contrast implied by (31) John likes to sing, can be spelled out like (32) John likes to sing vs. John doesn't like/ hates to sing. 24