PREPOSITIONAL TO-INFINITIVES IN ENGLISH

抄録

Many generativists have thrown light on only the sentential properties of to-infinitives and failed to observe their prepositional features. That to-infinitives are prepositional can be confirmed by their similarity with PPs in distribution and meaning. Our claim in this paper is that there is a class of verbs whose to-infinitive complements are best analyzed as PPs, though other to-infinitive complements are to be regarded as Ss. This assumption will be supported by both syntactic and semantic evidence. It will also produce a desirable effect on the way in which the clausal complements of verbs are subcategorized.