The choice between infinitives and that-clauses after believe

Abstract

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.