Corpora and Complementation

The book explores the evolution of English predicate complementation over the past three centuries, focusing on how nouns, adjectives, and verbs select complement clauses. A significant aspect is the analysis of the to -ing construction, such as in "He resorted to borrowing money," and its variation with to infinitives. The study argues that the to -ing pattern has been increasingly adopted. It draws on a diverse range of authoritative corpora, including the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Spoken American English, to support its findings.