Infinitival copular complement clauses in English: Explaining the predominance of passive matrix verbs

Abstract

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 with active matrices (e.g. One might even have though him to be angry), and then addresses the pending question of why this should be so. A previous explanation has invoked the different word order of the passive construction versus that shared by the active construction and finite complements, combined with the purported markedness of nonfinite constructions. The alternative explanation presented here is based on the fact that though finite complements and infinitives with active matrices share the same word order, their typical information structure is different, in that the subjects of the former can introduce "new" referents, while "givenness" seems almost a necessary condition for the subjects of the latter. It is claimed that the typical information structure of active matrices plus infinitives makes the construction a dispreferred one, because it leads to redundancy in referential continuity and causes conflicts between candidates for sentence topic/theme status, disrupting the thematic progression of the text. © Walter de Gruyter.