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The choice between infinitives and that-clauses after believe1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Dirk Noël
Dirk Noël
Affiliation:
Department of EnglishUniversity of GentRozier 44B-9000 [email protected]
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Extract

Intuitive, sentence-based approaches have so far failed to account conclusively for the choice between a that-complement and an infinitival complement after believe-type verbs, in sentences like I believe something like this to be very much the case (EB2 1297) and I believe that monetary union is political union, and that the creation of a single currency is federalism (HHW 13012). Syntactically, there is no free variation between the two patterns, since there are a number of formal restrictions on the infinitival complements that do not apply to the that-complements. But is there a semantic motivation behind the choice in cases when there are no formal reasons for choosing one or the other? This paper surveys a few earlier suggestions to this effect, but argues that a corpus-based approach unmistakably suggests that factors of a textual nature are at work, rather than purely semantic ones.2

Type
Articles
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , November 1997 , pp. 271 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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