Corpora and Complementation: Tracing Sentential Complementation Patterns of Nouns, Adjectives, and Verbs over the Last Three Centuries

Corpora and Complementation investigates the system of English predicate complementation over the last three centuries. The individual chapters shed light on central parts of the system, involving nouns, adjectives and verbs that select complement clauses. A focal point of the investigation is the to -ing, as in He resorted to borrowing money. Variation between this pattern and to infinitives is examined at length in the complements of different types of matrix predicates and it is argued that the to -ing pattern has been spreading in recent centuries. This analysis of English predicate complementation is underpinned by a unique combination of authoritative sources including the British National Corpus, the COBUILD online corpus, the Corpus of Spoken American English, and the Chadwyck-Healey corpus.

Juhani Rudanko is a professor of English at the University of Tampere, Finland.