Participle clauses between adverbial and complement

Abstract

The present paper offers a synchronic and diachronic analysis of integrated participle clauses or IPCs in English, as found in constructions such as the mayor is busy washing his car or many students had trouble finding the correct answer. Typically, IPCs have developed from adverbial participle clauses into complement clauses. Given their adverbial origins, they can occur as complements to predicates that do not normally take nominal direct objects. Synchronically, criteria are discussed for distinguishing IPCs from adverbial clauses, and it is shown that the distinction between IPCs and adverbial participle clauses is non-discrete. Diachronically, the origins of IPCs are traced, showing that IPCs emerged gradually in the course of the Modern English period. It is argued that initially the primary mechanism of change was (analogically-induced) reanalysis, yet at a later stage IPCs began to assert themselves as a category in its own right, spreading to new contexts through analogical extension. Thus, the discussion illustrates how adverbial clauses can turn into complements, and at the same time shows how a new syntactic (if fuzzy) pattern takes shape.

Keywords:

• adverbial
• analogy
• complementation
• English
• fuzziness
• gerund
• gradience
• participle
• syntax
• reanalysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgments

I would especially like to thank Olga Fischer for reading and commenting on two earlier versions of this paper, and Hubert Cuyckens for going through another pre-final version one last time. Further, I also benefited from some of the comments of participants at the fourteenth ICEHL conference in Bergamo.

Notes

1. Data used in this paper have been collected from various corpora. Present-Day English material has been gathered primarily from the Collins Cobuild Corpus (CB) (containing about 56 million words), and occasionally from the British National Corpus (BNC), the International Corpus of English – Great Britain (ICE-GB), Google, and occasional printed sources. Historical data have been gathered primarily from the extended version of the Corpus of Late Modern English texts (CLMETEV) (the last section of which covers the period 1850–1920 and contains about 6.3 million words) and the Corpus of English Novels (CEN) (which covers the period 1881–1922 and contains about 25 million words) (for more information on these, see the website: http://perswww.kuleuven.be/hendrik_desmet). Where necessary the historical data have been supplemented with data from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), the Corpus of Early Modern English texts (CEMET), the Lampeter Corpus (LC), the Proceedings from the Old Bailey, and the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus (ICAMET).

2. Incidentally, adjuncts can occasionally be controlled by the subject of a previous clause, as in the following example: Third party developers were reluctant to release applications for Windows, complaining that it was slow. This was certainly true running on the 6MHz ATs of the day (ICE-GB).

3. An alternative questioning strategy avoids the addition of a preposition and instead makes use of extraposition, keeping the IPC-slot filled with semantically ‘empty’ doing and using the question word what as its extraposed object, e.g. what did Jeff have a lot of success doing?

4. The fact that to-infinitival complements less strongly resist the insertion of adverbial material between main verb and complement may reflect the lower degree of ‘nouniness’ of to-infinitives as compared to gerund clauses (Ross 1973), or may reflect the fact that, like IPCs, to-infinitival complements historically derive from adverbial constructions (see Section 2.2).

5. Note that if finished shows the same alternation, this remains invisible since the pattern with have is indistinguishable from the verb complement construction with gerund clause.

6. The same possibility of inserting when or if applies to the adjectives occupied, engaged, and employed when preceded by the adverb better.

7. For be gone this statement may have to be qualified: John is gone fishing implies that John went out purposely in order to go fishing – an implication of intentionality that is missing with John is gone.

8. Notice that in Table 2 characteristics a. (omission of PC renders matrix clause ungrammatical) and c. (omission of PC changes semantics of matrix clause predicate) are logically linked. If under omission of the PC the meaning of a predicate changes it still has to be grammatical, while if a predicate becomes ungrammatical, presumably we can no longer say anything about its meaning.

9. The manner of obtaining figures differs slightly for the two periods represented in Table 3, due to the different concordancing programs used to access different corpora: CEN and CLMETEV were accessed using Wordsmith Tools 3.0; CB could only be accessed using the interface that comes with the corpus. Differences apply to sampling methods and to the search strings used. Thus, the percentages in Table 3 are based on samples when corpus searches yielded too many instances. Samples were taken for be busy and spend TIME in the period 1850–1920, which were sampled at 1/3 hits and 1/12 hits respectively, and for spend TIME, be happy, be late, be slow, have difficulty, and have trouble in the period 1990–1995, which were sampled at 200 hits for be happy and be slow and 150 hits for the other predicates (with the differences in sample sizes compensating for the amount of junk hits with some predicates). The search strings that were used were based on the main lexical word in the predicate (e.g. busy, happy, and so on) followed by a gap of zero to one words, followed by a word ending in -ing for the period 1850–1920, or a form tagged VBG (i.e. verbal form in -ing) for the period 1990–1995 – for the expression spend TIME, the gap between spend/spends/ … and the form in -ing was zero to five words, so as to leave room for the TIME-NP. Note finally, that it is not always easy to distinguish between IPCs and participial adjuncts (see further, Section 2.2) or between the gerunds with in that function as complement and those that function as adverbial. For this reason, counts are based on instances that can be interpreted as IPCs or complement uses of the gerund with in.

10. The construction with busy and IPC or disjunctive PC is particularly frequent in the diary of Samuel Pepys (49a–b), although as the examples show, it occurs elsewhere as well (49c–e). The same is true for the construction with spend TIME, which is also strikingly frequent in Samuel Pepys’ diary; here too, however, the ambiguous instances are found both in the writings of Samuel Pepys (50a) and elsewhere (50b–c).

11. Concerning Haspelmath's universal pathway of change from purposive adverbial clause to infinitival complement it may be added that the change does not necessarily run its full course and may in fact recede again (Fischer 2000).

12. The figures for the period 1640–1710 are based on a subpart of PPCEME3, containing about 95,000 words of running text, on the basis of a corpus search on the orthographical sequence -ing. The figures for the period 1850–1920 were obtained in similar fashion, carrying out a similar search on -ing on a subpart of CLMETEV3 containing about 89,000 words. The figures for Present-Day English were obtained from the tagged and parsed ICE-GB corpus. The ICE-GB corpus was not searched for -ing (which the corpus interface does not allow) but for all verb phrases tagged as -ing-participles (ICE-GB was preferred to CB because the latter's interface neither allows searching on parts of words nor on tags unaccompanied by lexical material). To increase comparability with the historical data only subsections of the corpus were sampled, using different sampling rates to adjust the balance between text genres: the sections Non-academic writing, Reportage, Instructional writing, and Persuasive writing were sampled at 25%, the section Creative writing was sampled at 50%. Together, the sampled sections are good for an estimated 69,000 words of text.

13. Figures should be interpreted cautiously, since it is sometimes difficult to distinguish participial adjuncts from participial disjuncts. The presence of an explicit subject has been regarded as a fully reliable criterion to separate disjuncts from adjuncts. Less reliable is the presence or absence of a (written) comma; instead, in case of doubt the scopal tests described in Section 1.1.1 were given priority in determining the adjunct/disjuncts status of a given adverbial participle. The estimated frequencies given in Table 5 are conservative, in that adjuncts have only been recognized as such when an adjunct reading yields the most plausible interpretation in context. One specific difficulty is presented by the Present-Day English data, which contain the fairly frequent use of the participle using in a somewhat grammaticalized form, as a semi-preposition roughly meaning ‘with, by means of’ (e.g. do not open the can using a knife). Because it is practically impossible to distinguish prepositional from non-prepositional uses, instances of this kind have not been counted. When included, the estimated frequency of participial adjuncts would rise to about 29 instances per 100,000 words for the period.

14. Incidentally, as Langacker (1991b: 326–7) points out, an experiencer is to some extent an active participant in event structure since experiencing requires the establishment of mental contact with the thing experienced as well as the activation of some cognitive representation (cp. Hollmann 2003: 59).

14. Admittedly, as far as IPCs are concerned such characterizations remain hard to prove on non-intuitive grounds. Evidence for the semantic characterization of the -ing-suffix comes from the distribution of the progressive tense and from the mass noun-like behavior of gerunds in a number of environments (Langacker 1991; Heyvaert 2004). It may be assumed that other -ing-constructions inherit their semantics from such uses.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this paper has been made possible by a grant from the Fund for Scientific Research (FWO) – Flanders. The research was carried out at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication.