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

Jackendoff (1983) derives two arguments from general theoretical assumptions and from considerations of language acquisition that show that, in addition to the system of syntactic rules, we need a set of semantic wellformedness rules to account for existing patterns of complementation in language in general and for the distribution of nonfinite complements in particular, and that in fact it may turn out that some of the observed syntactic regularities are predictable from certain semantic well-formedness rules. He points out that a theory of language with a close syntax

—semantics mapping is superior to one in which this is lacking, because a theory with an impoverished semantic component cannot predict that "many apparently syntactic constraints follow from semantic constraints, so that once a language learner has learned the meaning of the construction in question, the observed syntactic distribution will follow automatically" (ibid., 13). He argues that if we work on the reasonable assumption that language is a "relatively efficient and accurate encoding of the information it conveys" it is only natural to "look for systematicity in the relationship between syntax and semantics," which, however, "is not to say that every aspect of syntax should be explainable in semantic terms" (ibid., 14). For example, there is no semantic reason why draw, unlike many other transitive verbs such as say, mention, etc., should not take eventive that-clause complements in English, as the equivalents of these in Hungarian all do, in sentences like (1) * John drew that Mary was wearing a hat Jackendoff's theory indeed predicts that the semantic structure that corresponds to (1) is well-formed, yet the sentence is ungrammatical in English (see ibid., 232). Quite a few interesting observations have been made in the literature that suggest that in a significant number of cases the occurrence of nonfinite complements in English is predictable from certain semantic properties of matrix predicates (see, for instance, Lees 1960, Vendler 1968, Kiparsky and Kiparsky 1970, Menzel 1975, Klein 1982, Andersson 1985, and Wierzbicka 1988). They vary in explanatory value from the vacuous (such 14