Infinitival copular complement clauses in English: explaining the predominance of passive matrix verbs
Dirk Noël
This article first provides empirical evidence from the 100-million-word British National corpus in support of earlier less well documented observations that infinitival copular complements occur much more often with passive matrix clauses (e.g. Towns were thought to be organic or haphazard creations until recently) than active matrices One might even have though him angry), and then addresses pending question why this should so. A previous explanation has invoked different word order construction versus shared by finite combined purported markedness nonfinite constructions. The alternative presented here is based on fact infinitives share same order, their typical information structure different, subjects former can introduce new referents, while givenness' seems almost a necessary condition for latter. It claimed plus makes dispreferred one, because it leads redundancy referential continuity causes conflicts between candidates sentence topic/theme status, disrupting thematic progression text
Linguistics