The (Un)Reality of the Perfect Infinitive, Reconsidered from a Constructional Perspective
Keywords:
infinitival perfect, be to, constructions, corpus
Abstract
Due to great diachronic as well as synchronic variation and change, the perfect aspect has been studied to a great extent. In English, its infinitival form (have + past participle) has been largely neglected, however. This paper therefore seeks to explore ‘non-core’ grammatical constructions of the type Vpast; + perfect infinitive, especially their function and use in BNC, COCA and COHA. It challenges previous explanatory attempts by arguing that the perfect infinitive in the environments discussed does not indicate counterfactuality, as commonly believed. Instead, by taking a constructional perspective, the use of the perfect infinitive is argued to be a case of anteriority agreement, whereby speakers feel the urge to place the proposition on the same temporal level as the matrix verb. The findings of the corpus-based study further suggest that perfect infinitive constructions are in decline and might be in the process of disappearing from English altogether. Thus, this article attempts to extend the discussion of the perfect aspect to one of its non-finite forms but at the same time provides further implications for explaining recent change of the perfect aspect in general.
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References
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MITCHELL, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax Volume 1: Concord, the Parts of Speech and the Sentence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
MOLENCKI, Rafal. 1999. “A History of the English Perfect Infinitive”, in «Studia Anglia Posnaniensia» 34, 91-121.
MOLENCKI, Rafal. 2003. “Proscriptive Prescriptivists: On the Loss of the ‘Pleonastic’ Perfect Infinitive in Counterfactual Constructions in Late Modern English”. In DOSSENA, Marina and Charles JONES (eds.). Insights into Late Modern English. Linguistic Insights 7. Bern, Wien: Peter Lang, 175-196.
MURREY, Lindley. 1805. English Grammar I. New York.
MUSTANOJA, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English Syntax Part I: Parts of Speech. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
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PALMER, Frank. 1990. Modality and the English Modals. (2nd edition). London, New York: Longman.
QUIRK, Randolph, Sidney GREENBAUM, Geoffrey LEECH and Jan SVARTVIK. 1995. A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London, New York: Longman.
THURBER, James. 1950. “The Perfect Infinitive”, in THURBER, James. My Life and Hard
Times & The Owl in the Attic. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 142-145.
VISSER, Fredericus Theodorus. 1963-1967. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Part Three, Second Half. Syntactical Units with Two and with More Verbs. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
AMMAN, Andreas. 2007. “The Fate of ‘Redundant’ Verbal Forms“, in «Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung» 60, 186-204.
BARBIERS, Sjef. 2008. “Microvariation in Syntactic Doubling – an introduction”, in BARBIERS, Sjef, Olaf KOENEMAN, Marika LAKAKOU and Margreet VAN DER HAM (eds.). Microvariation in Syntactic Doubling. Syntax and Semantics Volume 36. Bingley: Emerald, 1-34.
BARBIERS, Sjef, KOENEMAN, Olaf, LEKAKOU Marika. 2011. “Perfect Doubling”. http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/o.n.c.j.koeneman/bestanden/Perfect%20doubling%20%28first%20draft%29.pdf (20 Apr 2012) “be, v.”. OED Online. June 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/16441?rskey=Zf7k50&result=3 (accessed June 12, 2013).
BEREZOWSKI, Leszek. 2004. “What’s Unreal about the Perfect Infinitive?”, in «Anglica Wratislaviensia» XLII, 89-100.
BOLINGER, Dwight L. 1968. “Entailment and the Meaning of Structures”, in «Glossa» 2, 119-127.
BOWIE, Jill AARTS, Bas. 2011. “Change in the English infinitival perfect construction”. Prepublication version. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/verb-phrase/ChangeInfinitivalPerfect.pdf (13 May 2013).
BOWIE, Jill, WALLIS, Sean, AARTS, Bas. 2013. “The Perfect in Spoken British English.” Pre-publication draft of BOWIE, Jill, Sean WALLIS and Bas AARTS. 2013. “The perfect in spoken British English” in AARTS, Bas, Joanne CLOSE, Geoffrey LEECH and Sean WALLIS (eds.). The English Verb Phrase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/verbphrase/book/bowiewallisaarts.pdf (20 April 2013).
BRUNNER, Karl. 1962. Die Englische Sprache. Ihre Geschichtliche Entwicklung. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
COBBETT, Will. 1831. A Grammar. New York.
DAVIES, Mark. 2004-. BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/.
DAVIES, Mark. 2008-. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 425 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
DAVIES, Mark. 2010-. The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810-2009. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.
DEPRAETERE, Ilse, REED. Susan. 2006. “Mood and Modality in English”, in AARTS, Bas and April MCMAHON (eds.). The Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 269-290.
DENISON, David. 1998. “Syntax” in ROMAINE, Suzanne (ed.). The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume IV: 1776-1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 92-329.
ELSNESS, Johan. 1997. The Perfect and the Preterite in Contemporary and Earlier English. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
ELSNESS, Johann. 2009. “The Present Perfect and the Preterite”. In ROHDENBURG, Günter and Julia SCHLÜTER (eds.). One language, two grammars?: differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 228-245.
FOWLER, Henry Watson. 1926 [1965]. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. (2nd edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
FRIED, Mirjam, ÖSTMAN, Jan-Ola. 2004. “Construction Grammar. A thumbnail sketch”, in FRIED, Mirjam and Jan-Ola ÖSTMAN (eds.). Construction Grammar in a CrossLanguage Perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 11-86.
GOLDBERG, Adele. 1995. Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
GOLDBERG, Adele, CASENHISER, Devin. 2006. “English Constructions”. In AARTS, Bas and April MCMAHON (eds.). The Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 343-355.
GÖRLACH, Manfred. 1991. Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
HOGEWEG, Lotte. 2009. “What’s So Unreal about the Past? Past Tense and Counterfactuals”, in TSANGALIDIS, Anastasios and Roberta FACCHINETTI (eds.). Studies on English Modality. Bern: Peter Lang, 181-208.
HUNDT, Marianne, SMITH, Nicholas. 2009. “The Present Perfect in British and American English: Has there been any change, recently?”, in «ICAME Journal» 33, 45-63.
IATRIDOU, Sabine. 2000. “The Grammatical Ingredients of Counterfactuality”, in «Linguistic Inquiry» 31(2), 231-270.
JAMES, Francis. 1985. “James Thurber on the Perfect Infinitive after the Past Conditional”, in «Pacific Coast Philology» 20, 75-79.
LARREYA, Paul. 2003. “Irrealis, Past Time Reference and Modality”, in FACCHINETTI, Roberta, Manfred KRUG and Frank PALMER (eds.). Modality in Contemporary English. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 21-45.
LASS, Roger. 1980. On Explaining Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LEECH, Geoffrey. 2003. “Modality on the Move: The English Modal Auxiliaries 1961-1992”, in FACCHINETTI, Roberta, Manfred KRUG and Frank PALMER (eds.). Modality in Contemporary English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 223-240.
LEECH, Geoffrey, HUNDT, Marianne, MAIR, Christian (eds.). Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LEVIN, Magnus and Hans LINDQUIST. 2013. “Like I Said Again and Again and Over and Over. On the ADV1 and ADV1 Construction with Adverbs of Direction in English”, in «International Journal of Corpus Linguistics» 18(1), 7-33.
MCFADDEN, Thomas, ALEXIADOU, Artemis. 2006. “Auxiliary Selection and Counterfactuality in the History of English and Germanic”, in HARTMANN, Jutta M. and László MOLNÁRFI (eds.). Comparative Studies in Germanic Syntax. John Benjamins: 237-262.
MITCHELL, Bruce. 1985. Old English Syntax Volume 1: Concord, the Parts of Speech and the Sentence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
MOLENCKI, Rafal. 1999. “A History of the English Perfect Infinitive”, in «Studia Anglia Posnaniensia» 34, 91-121.
MOLENCKI, Rafal. 2003. “Proscriptive Prescriptivists: On the Loss of the ‘Pleonastic’ Perfect Infinitive in Counterfactual Constructions in Late Modern English”. In DOSSENA, Marina and Charles JONES (eds.). Insights into Late Modern English. Linguistic Insights 7. Bern, Wien: Peter Lang, 175-196.
MURREY, Lindley. 1805. English Grammar I. New York.
MUSTANOJA, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English Syntax Part I: Parts of Speech. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
NESSELHAUF, Nadja. 2006. “The Decline of be to and the Rise of be going to in Late Modern English: Connection or Coincidence?”, in HOUSWITSCHKA, Christoph, Gabriele KNAPPE and Anja MÜLLER (eds.). Anglistentag 2005 Bamberg. Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English, Volume XXVI. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 515-529.
PALMER, Frank. 1990. Modality and the English Modals. (2nd edition). London, New York: Longman.
QUIRK, Randolph, Sidney GREENBAUM, Geoffrey LEECH and Jan SVARTVIK. 1995. A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London, New York: Longman.
THURBER, James. 1950. “The Perfect Infinitive”, in THURBER, James. My Life and Hard
Times & The Owl in the Attic. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 142-145.
VISSER, Fredericus Theodorus. 1963-1967. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Part Three, Second Half. Syntactical Units with Two and with More Verbs. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Published
2013-12-31
How to Cite
Senft, E. (2013). The (Un)Reality of the Perfect Infinitive, Reconsidered from a Constructional Perspective. Rhesis. International Journal of Linguistics, Philology and Literature, 4(1), 40-64. https://doi.org/10.13125/rhesis/5577
Section
Articoli
