Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Csaba Ceglédi: On the Constituent Structure of Infinitives and Gerunds in English
76 CSABA CZEGLÉDI it. Chierchia (1984), for example, argues that English infinitives and gerunds are verb phrases, while in Chomsky 1981, and much other work inspired by GB, either both infinitives and gerunds, or at least the former, are analyzed as embedded sentences. Köster 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 clausal hypothesis make, and they conclude that infinitives —and as the analysis, they claim, extends readily to gerunds, they too —are sentences in English. Not all hypotheses treat infinitives and gerunds uniformly, though. It is often argued, principally, and sometimes exclusively, on distributional grounds, that infinitives and gerunds must be assigned to different categories. In Chomsky 1981, for example, infinitives are sentences, and gerunds are NPs, although Chomsky leaves open the possibility that gerunds "might be analyzed as containing a clause internal to the NP" (p. 223, fn. 10). In the lexicalist framework of Maxwell (1984), which might be characterized as intermediate in a sense between the VP hypothesis and the clausal hypothesis, infinitives and gerunds are likewise treated differently. Maxwell claims, quite surprisingly perhaps, that gerunds but not infinitives are sentences in English, the latter taken to be VPs. Finally, it has also been proposed that ^-infinitives should be treated as prepositional phrases headed by the particle to, analyzed as a preposition, and thus kept distinct from gerunds, which are claimed to be noun phrases (Duffley and Tremblay 1994). These and related issues are discussed in sections 2 and 3 below. 2 The Constituent Structure of Infinitives 2.1 The PP Hypothesis An intriguing but extremely problematic proposal concerning the category of English /ö-infinitives is put forth by Duffley and Tremblay (1994), who argue that "the best way to describe the syntactic role of the /o-infinitive seems to be to analyze it as a prepositional phrase having an adverbial function with respect to the main verb." Duffley and Tremblay argue, following Emonds (1976), that gerunds but not /o-infinitives are NPs. The significance of the NP status of gerunds for their hypothesis is to confirm that gerunds and /o-infinitives are different syntactic categories. This would lend indirect support to
