Download Symposium on Complementation

Symposium on Complementation
In honour of Professor Juhani Rudanko
October 23, 2015
Pinni B1097
Abstracts
PLENARY SPEECHES
Variation in Clausal Verb Complementation
Hubert Cuyckens (University of Leuven)
The purpose of this paper is to offer a corpus-based analysis of probabilistic complementclause variation from Middle English (ME) to Present-day English (PDE) as well as examining
what factors co-determine this variation at the level of usage or on-line discourse. I will shortly
discuss earlier studies within this perspective examining the variation between finite thatclauses and (mainly) non-finite -ing gerundial clauses with the CTPs remember, regret, deny, and
admit (see Cuyckens, D’hoedt, and Szmrecsanyi 2014; Cuyckens and D’hoedt 2015). The focus
of my presentation will be on CC-variation between the finite that-clause (including the zerocomplementizer clause), ECM/VOSI complementation (Los 2005) containing the to-infinitive,
and the Small Clause, with the matrix verbs believe, suppose, and find.1 Examples are in (1):
(1)
a.
b.
c.
d.
I believe that he is a wise man. (that-clause)
I believe he is a wise man. (zero-complementizer clause)
I believe him to be a wise man. (to-infinitive; ECM-clause)
I believe him a wise man. (SC)
Analysis of the variation illustrated in (1) has revealed the following general tendencies. First,
the zero-complement takes up an important share of the complementation patterns, and is on
the rise with all three verbs. Moreover, as the zero-complement is strongly tied to the epistemic
meaning of suppose, its increasing frequency can be accounted for in terms of Traugott’s (1989)
notion of “subjectification”. Second, Rohdenburg’s Cognitive Complexity Principle (1996) can
be seen to play a crucial role in accounting for the tendency of SCs, to-infinitives, and even
zero-complements to occur in structurally less complex contexts (characterized by noncomplex subjects, no intervening material, and expressing simultaneity), whereas the thatcomplement preferably occurs in structurally complex contexts. Further, some element of
“semantic specialization” is of importance as well, in that the zero-complement is strongly
associated with epistemic meanings of suppose, and in that find prefers SCs when denoting
mental meanings but that-complements when denoting perception. Finally, the to-infinitive
appears to be declining strongly with each of the CTPs, which we ascribe to its similarities
with the SC, and its failure to exploit its verbal qualities.
Our analysis is not concerned with the question whether sentences such as (4c) might be derived from
sentences such as (4a) (through Raising; see Postal 1974 and Bresnan 1976 for a critical review). Rather,
we consider the that-clauses and to-infinitive clauses under investigation to have derived from
diachronically different sources, but synchronically to make up sets of variants.
1
The INTO CAUSATIVE Construction: Insights from Large Corpora
Mark Davies (Brigham Young University) and Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung-Hee University)
The “into causative” (or transitive causative) construction (she talked them into staying, they
wheedled her into paying for it) has been the focus of a number of studies during the last 10-15
years, and Juhani Rudanko has been the most active researcher (by far) on this topic during
this time (e.g. Rudanko 2002, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2012, 2013).
In this study, we will examine data from several relatively new corpora (most of which were
not available to Rudanko when the previous studies were carried out), which shed interesting
light on the construction. Out study is based on more than 20,000 tokens of the “into causative”
construction from the following three corpora: the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary
American English (COCA; 1990-2012), the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American
English (COHA; 1810s-2000s), and the 1.9 billion word Corpus of Global Web-Based English
(GloWbE). We will consider the following topics:
1. The overall increase in the construction during the last 200 years, and when was this most
pronounced.
2. The spread of the construction across different matrix verbs during this time.
3. The semantic fields of the matrix verbs (e.g. force, deception, persuasion) that have
experienced the most change over time.
4. Truly innovative uses in large synchronic corpora (especially very informal writing, like
blogs), e.g. the matrix verbs carve, complain, deflect, depress, edge, google, lumber, slant, squirrel,
cloud, cuddle, hack, magick, muddy, randomize, style, and tug.
5. “Indirect causation”, e.g. Fran organized Kathy into buying some smart cotton dresses, or it’s
helped to build America into exploring new frontiers.
6. The interplay with the “way construction”, e.g. a conman tricks his way into being elected to the
US Congress or he tries to wheedle his way into sharing Christmas.
7. The historical trajectory of “neutral verbs”, e.g. influence, impel, induce, lead, motivate, prompt,
and stimulate. Have they been increasing or decreasing over time, and which dialect uses them
the most?
8. Dialectal differences between British and American English, following the claim in Wulff et
al (2007) that British English uses more verbs of force and that American English uses more
verbs of persuasion.
9. The interplay between the “into causative” and the TO nonfinite construction (they inspired
them to do it / they inspired them into doing it)
10. Possible precursors of the construction in Early Modern English, as seen from the new 700
million word Early English Books corpus.
References
Rudanko, Juhani. 2002. Complements and constructions. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
----------. 2005. Lexico-Grammatical Innovation in Current British and American English: A Case Study
on the Transitive into -ing Pattern with Evidence from the Bank of English Corpus. Studia
Neophilologica 77: 171-187.
----------. 2006. Emergent Alternation in Complement Selection: The spread of the Transitive into -ing
Construction in British and American English. English Linguistics 34.4: 312- 331.
----------. 2011. Changes in complementation in British and American English. Houndmills, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
----------. 2012. The transitive into -ing construction in early twentieth-century American English, with
evidence from the TIME Corpus. In Sebastian Hoffmann, Paul Rayson & Geoffrey Leech, (eds.),
English Corpus Linguistics: Looking back, Moving forward. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
----------. 2013. Wheedled me into lending him my best hunter: Comparing the emergence of the
transitive into -ing pattern in British and American English”. Paper delivered at Tampere
Linguistics Forum: Perspectives on Complementation, University of Tampere, August 2013.
Wulff, Stefanie, Anatol Stefanowitsch, & Stefan Gries. 2007. Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans:
Variety-specific meaning construction in the into-causative. In Gunter Radden, Klaus-Michael
Kopcke, Thomas Berg, & Peter Siemund (eds.), Aspects of Meaning Construction, 265-281.
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
On the early history of the English motion construction type The coach rumbled up and
down
Teresa Fanego (University of Santiago de Compostela)
The aim of this paper is to examine the early history of the constructional pattern exemplified
in the title and reproduced more fully in (2):
(1) 1483 Caxton tr. J. de Voragine Golden Legende f. ccclxvi/2: His thye ['thigh'] beganne
romble and made soo grete a noyse that it semed that the bone brake. [OED rumble v.2 3. 'To
make a low heavy continuous, but varying, sound'.]
(2) 1642 J. Taylor St. Hillaries Teares 5: The Coaches which had wont to rumble up and
downe. [OED rumble v.2 4.a. 'To move or travel with a rumbling sound'.]
In (1) the sound-emission verb rumble is used without a following directional phrase, to denote
an intransitive non-motion event involving the production of a sound of some kind. In (2), by
contrast, the presence of the directional phrase up and down turns the clause as a whole into an
event of translational directional motion which denotes, in addition, that a sound is emitted as
a result of the motion. Similar examples are comparatively frequent in contemporary English
(see Rohde 2001: 244), constituting a subtype of the much larger class of motions expressions
first described by Goldberg (1995: 3, 78) under the label of Intransitive Motion Construction
(IMC), as in (3):
(3) Intransitive Motion Construction [SUBJ V PPdirectional]
a. The man crawled to Winchester
b. The girl walked out of the room
The IMC has been intensively studied in recent years. Most analyses have approached the
construction synchronically or from a typological perspective (e.g. Rohde 2001: 237-297,
Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004: 536-544, Filipović 2007, among many others), but the early history
of the construction has also received some attention in work by Huber (2012, 2013a, 2013b),
Stefanowitsch (2013) and Fanego (2012). Virtually nothing has been done, however, on the
variant of the IMC illustrated in (2) above, where the verb is one of sound. This paper,
therefore, will try to trace the emergence and development of this subtype, referred to
henceforth as IMC RESULT, from Old English times to the early 20th century. Its interrelation
with the various subpatterns making up the IMC network in earlier stages of English and with
related motion patterns such as the way-construction (cf. [4] below, and Goldberg 1995: 199218, Israel 1996, Mondorf 2011, Traugott & Trousdale 2012: 76-91) will also be considered.
Likewise, attention will be paid to the issue of the division of labour between verbal semantics
and constructional semantics in examples such as (2) above, where the meaning of the verb
rumble, essentially denoting a one-place, non-motion process, is "non-congruent with the
construction it appears in" (Langacker 2009: 171).
(4) CLMET3.0 1842 George Borrow The Bible in Spain: The steamer was not yet arrived [...]. It
came at last in sight, plashed its way forward, stopped, and I was soon on board.
References
Fanego, Teresa. 2012. Motion events in English: the emergence and diachrony of manner salience from
Old English to Late Modern English. Folia Linguistica Historica 33: 29-85.
Filipović, Luna. 2007. Talking about motion. A crosslinguistic investigation of lexicalization patterns.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg, Adele E., & Ray Jackendoff. 2004. The English resultative as a family of constructions.
Language 80: 532-568.
Huber, Judith. 2012. No man entreth in or out: How are typologically unsuitable loanverbs integrated into
English? In Irén Hegedűs & Alexandra Fodor, eds. English historical linguistics 2010. Selected papers
from the sixteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16), Pécs, 23-27
August 2010. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 327–346.
Huber, Judith. 2013a. Caused-Motion verbs in the Middle English Intransitive Motion Construction. In
Juliana Goschler & Anatol Stefanowitsch, eds. Variation and change in the encoding of motion events.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 203–222.
Huber, Judith. 2013b. Motion and the English verb. A diachronic study. PhD thesis. Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität, Munich.
Israel, Michael. 1996. The way constructions grow. In Adele E. Goldberg, ed. Conceptual structure,
discourse and language. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 217-230.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2009. Cognitive (Construction) Grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 20: 167-176.
Mondorf, Britta. 2011. Variation and change in English resultative constructions. Language Variation and
Change 22: 397-421.
Rohde, Ada. 2001. Analyzing Path: The interplay of verbs, prepositions and constructional semantics. PhD
dissertation, Rice University.
Stefanowitsch, A. 2013. Variation and change in English path verbs and constructions: Usage patterns
and conceptual structure. In Juliana Goschler & Anatol Stefanowitsch, eds. Variation and change
in the encoding of motion events. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 223–244.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and constructional changes.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
SESSION PAPERS
Anglicising Finnish complementation? Examining the rakastan puhua (‘I love to speak’)
structure in present-day Finnish
Pertti Hietaranta (University of Helsinki)
It is argued by Lindquist (2009: 168) that “it is one thing to show that [language] change has
taken place and quite another to explain why change occurred,” and that some of these
changes are caused by external factors “such as fashion or language contact, when speakers of
different languages mix and interact.”
On such a stance, one can argue that the relatively recent emergence of rakastan puhua (‘I love
to speak’) instead of the traditional rakastan puhumista (‘I love speaking’) in the Finnish
complementation system can be seen as yet another piece of data exemplifying the
phenomenon of syntactic diglossia, i.e. language difference in social register in terms of the
variants used, as this notion is utilised by e.g. Rudanko (2010).
The present paper examines some of the properties of the rakastan puhua construction with a
view to establishing some of the causes for its appearance in present-day Finnish texts. It is
suggested that the factors contributing to the emergence of the construction consist in a
complex interplay of especially social considerations, some of which seem to be seldom
explicitly recognised by language users.
In addition to its syntactic aspects, the study also seeks to establish whether language contact
by means of translation is somehow responsible for this innovation in Finnish syntax and so
contributes to the (alleged or real) triumph of Anglicisation in Finnish. To this end, the corpus
of Finnish translations compiled at the University of Eastern Finland is examined, this
investigation then providing the data for some of the conclusions reached in the part of the
paper discussing the nonsyntactic factors behind the use of the construction.
References
Lindquist, Hans. 2009. Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press. Reprinted 2010.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2010. Change and variation in complement selection: a case study from recent English,
with evidence from large corpora. In Gries, Stefan Th., Stefanie Wulff, and Mark Davies (2010),
Corpus-linguistic applications: Current studies, new directions, pp. 47–66. Amsterdam/New York:
Rodopi.
Determinants of Complement Variation – The Case of Ashamed
Mikko Höglund (Stockholm University)
Grammatical variation is an area of linguistics that has been vastly studied, and the
advancements in computer technology have brought about increasingly more efficient
methods of corpus linguistics with which variation can be studied in more meticulous detail
than before. As larger and larger corpora become available, it is possible to investigate the
more subtle factors behind variation as well as variation in infrequent items.
One particular area that has benefited from the rise of corpus linguistics is complementation
studies. By using large corpora it is possible to extract thousands of examples of
complementation patterns, and uncover and quantify different variables that might contribute
to complement variation.
The majority of complementation studies in the past have focused on the complementation of
verbs, while adjective complementation has received less attention. There are, however,
studies that discuss adjective complementation, for instance Kjellmer (1980), Rudanko (1998,
2006, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015), Mindt (2011), Van linden (2010), Van linden & Davidse
(2009), Höglund (2014ab) and Havu & Höglund (2015).
The present paper examines the adjective ashamed and the variation in its complementation.
The study focuses on two patterns, the to infinitive complement (I was ashamed to admit it) and
the of -ing complement (I was ashamed of admitting it). The goal of the study is to observe the
distribution of the two patterns and the environments in which they typically occur. Different
determinants of grammatical variation (see Rohdenburg & Mondorf 2003) are investigated in
order to see which ones affect the choice of one or the other complementation pattern.
Rudanko (2014) investigated the same complement variation with afraid and concluded that,
like with accustomed and to infinitive vs. to -ing (Rudanko 2010), agentivity is a key factor in the
use of the competing patterns. In addition, it has been observed that the Complexity Principle
(Rohdenburg 1996) and the Extraction Principle (Vosberg 2003) play a role in grammatical
variation. All these factors and others such as the types of matrix and lower verbs, tense and
voice are examined in order to uncover the relevant determinants that account for the
variation.
The material is collected from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), which,
standing currently at 400 million words, provides enough data to investigate the
complementation patterns of ashamed. Additional material is extracted from other diachronic
corpora and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).
References
Havu, Jukka, & Höglund, Mikko. 2015. A Cross-Linguistic Perspective on Complementation in the
Tough Construction. In M. Höglund, P. Rickman, J. Rudanko & J. Havu (Eds.), Perspectives on
Complementation: Structure, Variation and Boundaries (pp. 52–74). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Höglund, Mikko. 2014a. Active and passive infinitive, ambiguity and non-canonical subject with ready.
In K. Davidse, C. Gentens, L. Ghesquière & L. Vandelanotte (Eds.), Corpus interrogation and
grammatical patterns (pp. 239–262). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Höglund, Mikko. 2014b. “Self-discipline strategies were easy to design but difficult to adhere to.” A
Usage-Based Study of the Tough Construction in English. Doctoral dissertation, University of
Tampere.
Kjellmer, Göran. 1980. Accustomed to swim; accustomed to swimming: on verbal forms after TO. In M.
Allwood & M. Ljung (Eds.), ALVAR: a linguistically varied assortment of readings. Studies presented
to Alvar Ellegård on the occasion of his 60th birthday (pp. 75–99). Stockholm Papers in English
Language and Literature 1. Stockholm: Department of English.
Mindt, Inka. 2011. Adjective Complementation: An empirical analysis of adjectives followed by that-clauses.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rohdenburg, Günther. 1996. Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English.
Cognitive Linguistics, 7(2), 149–182.
Rohdenburg, Günther. & Mondorf, Britta. (Eds.) 2003. Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rudanko, Juhani. 1998. Change and Continuity in the English Language: Studies on Complementation over the
Past Three Hundred Years. Lanham: University Press of America.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2006. Watching English grammar change: a case study on complement selection in
British and American English. English Language and Linguistics, 10(1), 31–48.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2010. Explaining Grammatical Variation and Change: a Case Study of
Complementation in American English over Three Decades. Journal of English Linguistics, 38(1),
4–24
Rudanko, Juhani. 2011. Changes in Complementation in British and American English: Corpus-Based Studies
on Non-Finite Complements in Recent English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2012. Exploring aspects of the Great Complement Shift, with evidence from the TIME
Corpus and COCA. In T. Nevalainen & E. C. Traugott (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of
English (pp. 222–232). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2014. A New Angle on Infinitival and of -ing Complements of afraid, with Evidence
from the TIME Corpus. In K. Davidse, C. Gentens, L. Ghesquière & L. Vandelanotte (Eds.), Corpus
interrogation and grammatical patterns (pp. 223–238). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2015. Linking Form and Meaning: Studies on Selected Control Patterns in Recent English.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Van linden, An. 2010. The rise of the to-infinitive: Evidence from adjectival complementation. English
Language and Linguistics, 4(1): 19–51.
Van linden, Ab. & Davidse, Kristin. 2009. The clausal complementation of deontic-evaluative adjectives
in extraposition constructions: A synchronic-diachronic approach. Folia Linguistica, 43(1), 175–
217.
Vosberg, Uwe. 2003. The role of extractions and horror aequi in the evolution of –ing complements in
Modern English. In G. Rohdenburg & B. Mondorf (Eds.), Determinants of Grammatical Variation in
English (pp. 305–327). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Diachronic Changes in the Use of the V + N + into -ing Complement Pattern in New Zealand
English
Paul Rickman, Mark Kaunisto and Jukka Tyrkkö (University of Tampere)
The V + N + into -ing pattern in complementation studies has been given a thorough treatment
in recent years (see, e.g. Rudanko 2000; 2002; 2015 (to name just a few); Davies 2012). Earlier
research has documented the emergence and spread of the pattern, and taken note of
important and subtle semantic aspects of its use. It has been pointed out, for example, that the
pattern is notable for providing an environment for new and innovative language use, with
an intriguing array of verbs functioning in matrix position, as the following tokens illustrate:
(1) a. I'll never forget that, because he finagled me into kissing him. (COCA 2000 SPOK)
b. Satay Village bounced the kids into trying different stuff. (CNZNE2 2010)
The majority of verbs found in this pattern could be described as being negative in flavour,
and fall into certain semantic groups denoting different types of force acting upon the direct
object argument. The present research focuses on the use of the pattern in New Zealand
English (NZE), and draws on evidence from a diachronic NZE corpus of newspaper English,
which comprises 100 million words from the years 1995-98, and 2010-12. The verbs are
categorised, with comment on the changes evident between the two time-frames of the corpus.
References
Davies, Mark. 2012. ‘Some methodological issues related to corpus-based investigations of recent
syntactic changes in English’ in Nevalainen, Terttu and Elizabeth Traugott (eds.), The Oxford Handbook
of the History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 157-174.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2000. Corpora and Complementation: Tracing Sentential Complementation Patterns of
Nouns, Adjectives and Verbs over the Last Three Centuries. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2002. Complements and Constructions. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Rudanko, Juhani. 2013. Wheedled me into lending him my best hunter: Comparing the emergence of
the transitive into -ing pattern in British and American English” in Höglund Mikko, Paul Rickman,
Juhani Rudanko and Jukka Havu (eds.) Perspectives on Complementation: Structure, Variation and
Boundaries. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 128-140.
2
The Corpus of New Zealand Newspaper English
The Sentential Complementation of Propose in Recent British English
Veera Saarimäki (University of Tampere)
According to data drawn from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) and the British
National Corpus (BNC), the frequency of the verb propose has decreased considerably in written
British English during the past 200 years. To determine how such a change is reflected in the
ways the verb is used, this presentation examines the development of the sentential
complementation of propose since the 1780s. The presentation is based on my MA thesis, which
examines the complementation of propose in the second (1780–1850) and third (1850–1920)
periods of the CLMET and the imaginative prose domain of the BNC (1960–early 1990s)
(Saarimäki 2014).
Propose is most typically found with two complement patterns, the noun phrase and the toinfinitive:
(1) He fell in with a friend or two coming back from bathing, proposed a glass of beer, to
which they assented… (CLMET: 1857 Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days)
(2) It seems to me that you propose to tell us, on the basis of your researches, the right
way to create super children, and then the right way to bring them up. (BNC: AN8
2289)
The focus in this presentation is exclusively on sentential complements (2), as this makes it
possible to take a look at some of the less frequent complement patterns of propose that have
previously been largely ignored apart from a brief mention in a few studies and dictionaries
(e.g., Poutsma MS, Rudanko 1989). In addition to mapping the changes that have taken place
during the ca. 200 years, the presentation examines the nature of the sentential complements
of propose from the point of view of some of the most prominent theories in the field of
complementation, i.e., the control theory (e.g., Davies & Dubinsky 2004), the complexity
principle (Rohdenburg 1996) and the horror aequi principle (Rohdenburg 2003).
References
The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by Oxford University
Computing
Services
on
behalf
of
the
BNC
Consortium.
Available
from
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk.
Corpus of Late Modern English Texts. Compiled by Hendrik De Smet. Available from
https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/clmet.
Davies, William D. and Stanley Dubinsky. 2004. The Grammar of Raising and Control: A Course in Syntactic
Argumentation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Poutsma, H. MS. Dictionary of Constructions of Verbs, Adjectives and Nouns. Unpublished. Copyright:
Oxford University Press.
Rohdenburg, Günter. 1996. Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English.
Cognitive Linguistics 7 (2): 149–82.
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2003. Cognitive complexity and horror aequi as factors determining the use of
interrogative clause linkers in English. In Topics in English Linguistics 43: Determinants of
Grammatical Variation in English, ed. Günter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf, 205–50. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Rudanko, Juhani. 1989. Complementation and Case Grammar: A Syntactic and Semantic Study of Selected
Patterns of Complementation in Present-Day English. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Saarimäki, Veera. 2014. The Complementation of the Verb Propose in Recent British English. M.A. Thesis.
Available from https://tampub.uta.fi/handle/10024/96656.
The Development of Infinitival Complementation with or without Language Contact
Peter Slomanson (University of Tampere)
In the history of European colonial activity overseas, languages that have been
straightforwardly characterized as contact languages have developed infinitival
complementation in grammars that previously lacked a finiteness contrast entirely, and in
which complement clauses were previously equivalent in form to matrix clauses, with little
structural asymmetry. One explanation for this has been contact as such and frequency of
exposure, as if acquiring a second language with infinitives necessarily means one’s original
language is likely to develop them. Another type of explanation involves demonstrating a
discourse advantage to the instantiation of a finiteness contrast as such in the contact language
grammar, involving non-finite adjunct clauses and infinitival complements. In one such
contact language, Sri Lankan Malay, the infinitival structures that have developed happen to
bear a surprising resemblance to infinitival constructions in English, since the English
construction and the Sri Lankan Malay construction both involve to-infinitives once based on
prepositional phrases involving to and the equivalent of to in Sri Lankan Malay. In this respect,
we find cross-linguistic similarity, however the constructions are not identical. I will discuss
the extent to which what is known about the origins of this well-attested construction in the
history of English can generalize to the development of languages such as Sri Lankan Malay
for which researchers cannot depend on a large body of historical texts, but must depend on
the construction of plausible diachronic scenarios.