Grammar, text type, and diachrony as factors influencing complement choice in historical American English1

Abstract

A key task in the study of the system of English predicate complementation is to account for the variation between to infinitive and gerundial complements of verbs and adjectives in recent English. This chapter examines to infinitive and to ‑ing complements of the adjective accustomed, with data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), in order to assess the impact of factors of different types on the variation in question. The grammatical factors are the Extraction and Choice Principles, and attention is also paid to the possible role of insertions. Following a discussion of the key theoretical concepts and a description of the primary data, a logistic regression model is used to analyse the role of independent variables on complement selection of the adjective accustomed.