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

The implied contrasts expressed in (21) and (22) above can be made explicit by spelling out one or more members of the relevant sets invoked by the adverbials something like this: (25) He is travelling in Yorkshire (as opposed to sleeping at home; lying in hospital (in Yorkshire); etc.) (26) He is travelling to Leeds (or from Halifax) (as opposed to Manchester; etc.) Quite surprisingly, one might say, the grammar of adverbials furnishes us with additional relevant evidence. Quirk et al. (1985:519) observe that if two spatial adjuncts of the same semantic class cooccur in a clause but at different levels of syntactic structure, so that one is a sentence adjunct, the other a predication adjunct, then the predication adjunct will be more prominent than the sentence adjunct, the latter expressing information which is understood as relatively given. For example, of the two position adjuncts in (27) Many people eat in restaurants in London. (Quirk et al. 1985:519) the sentence adjunct may be expressed with a closed-class adverb "indicating that it is relatively 'given'. . .," and when this happens, the order of adjuncts may be reversed (ibid., 519): (28) Many people eat here/there in restaurants. The point here is that if both sentence and predication adjunct of the same semantic class are present in a clause, the former tends to be understood as 'given' relative to the predication adjunct, and the latter invokes a set of similar conditions with which itself is implicitly contrasted, while the rest of the components of meaning expressed in the sentence, including the contribution of the sentence adjunct, are kept constant This implicit contrast may be spelled out like this: 23