Corpora and Complementation

More about the book

The book explores the evolution of English predicate complementation over the past three centuries, focusing on how nouns, adjectives, and verbs select complement clauses. A significant aspect is the analysis of the to -ing construction, such as in "He resorted to borrowing money," and its variation with to infinitives. The study argues that the to -ing pattern has been increasingly adopted. It draws on a diverse range of authoritative corpora, including the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Spoken American English, to support its findings.