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
78 CSABA CZEGLÉDI It would be equally problematic to assume that there are PPs in English of the form [ P P [ p to] [ a ...]], where a can only be a naked infinitive. Notice that we would still have infinitives, but all would be naked, /tf-infinitives having been eliminated from the grammar by being converted to PPs. If, on the other hand, a is a clause, then an important generalization will again be lost, since on this assumption the lexical entries for all non-prepositional verbs of the want type will have to be restructured so that they can take PP complements of this very special kind. These are highly undesirable consequences, therefore the hypothesis must be rejected as untenable. 2.2 The Clausal Hypothesis The assumption that English infinitives, as well as nonfmite complements in general, are sentences is well supported by theoretical as well as empirical arguments. Greenbaum (1980) and Quirk et al. (1985) present some relevant arguments informally. The essence of their arguments can be summarized like this: the constructions under discussion are regarded as sentences because their internal structure can be analyzed into the same constituents as independent sentences. A more formal discussion of the subject within a generative framework is offered by Köster and May (1982), who consider both the internal and the external syntax of nonfmites. Köster and May argue that infinitive complements on verbs, and that in fact all infinitives, are sentential. They assert, also, that the analysis extends readily to gerundial complements. In this type of analysis the complementizer and subject which are absent from superficial structure are represented by lexically empty categories. In this approach, "there are two types of clausal complements, finite and non-finite, symmetrical with respect to internal phrase-structure" (ibid., 116). It is assumed in general in what is referred to here as the clausal hypothesis that in infinitival and gerundial complements that lack a surface subject and complementizer "the missing constituents ... are in fact categorically present, but devoid of terminal elements" (ibid., 117). The major arguments center around three aspects of infinitive complements. First, it is demonstrated that infinitives not only have parallel phrase structure with finite clauses, but they also share the important syntactic property with finite clauses that a number of syntactic
