engleski

To-infinitive and Bare-infinitive Constructions with Perception Verbs

This thesis looks into the problem of complementation with four verbs of perception – see, feel, hear, and watch. Our main interest is the change in construction that happens once the verbs of perception are passivized: a. I heard her come up the stairs. b. She was heard to come up the stairs. These two sentences (a and b) give an example of what happens to a verb of perception once passivized. In the active sentence (a), the perception verb takes a bare or zero infinitive complement (come up the stairs). In the passive, once the object of the active sentence becomes the subject of the passive (her in (a) shifts to she in (b)), the complement construction also changes. We get a change from a bare infinitive complementation to a to-infinitive complementation (to come up the stairs). With the verb watch such passive construction is impossible: c. *She was watched to come up the stairs. In this paper we will focus precisely on these syntactic constructions, i.e. the change that occurs in the complement clause construction, when the complement changes from the bare infinitive to the to-infinitive. To find the reason behind the problem of the verbs of perception, we based our research on the principles of cognitive grammar and the findings from the British National Corpus. Our results confirmed that the to-infinitive complement changes the focus of a sentence and the meaning of the sentence, distancing the event from the speaker, which is also the goal of the passive sentence. The reason for the inability of the verb watch to take to-infinitive complement, and turn into the passive, is its immediacy of action. In short, it is not only the structure that accounts for the change ; there is clearly a shift in meaning that has to be taken into account.

to-infinitive; bare infinitive; complementation; English; perception verbs

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