Complement Selection and the Syntactic Status of Infinitival to: The Case of the Verb Submit

Abstract

Trends of change in the system of English predicate are often summed up under the label of the Great Complement Shift. An important aspect of the Shift concerns the increasing spread of gerundial complements at the expense of to infinitives. The spread affects to infinitives in relation to a number of gerundial constructions, and the present chapter offers a case study dealing with to infinitives and what have been called to -ing complements, selected by the matrix verb submit. The chapter examines the incidence of the two patterns with submit in both American and British English in the last two centuries, with data from COHA and the Hansard Corpus, which have not been investigated previously for this purpose. It is observed that the gerundial pattern has indeed become more frequent in relation to the to infinitive, but it is also shown in the chapter that to infinitives were very frequent in the nineteenth century, including cases where the lower clause is in the passive. By contrast, in current English such complements with to infinitives are quite rare. The chapter offers a grammar internal explanation for this finding, linking it to a change in the syntactic status of infinitival to in English, with corpus evidence documenting the change.