초록 열기/닫기 버튼
The purposes of this paper are two-fold: (i) to investigate the differences in conceptual distance between minimal pair sentences of to-infinitives and gerunds used as complements of English verbs begin and start from a cognitive grammar perspective; (ii) to test the validity of such cognitive approach by looking at to what extent native speakers of English recognize the semantic differences between the non-finite complements of such verbs and how well they differentiate the two accordingly. For (i), considering the finiteness of the non-finite complements to be the sign of the linguistic distance, the paper concludes that to-infinitives are more finite than gerunds and thus they are linguistically and semantically more distant from the main verbs according to the distance principle of iconicity. Then, for (ii), with the participation of 57 English native speakers, who were asked to choose either to-infinitives or gerunds, a survey was conducted that consists of minimal pair sentences of start and begin. The results were as follows. First, it was found that there is a conceptual difference between to-infinitive and gerund complements caused by their finiteness and that the cognitive grammar approach to the meaning differences is valid. Second, it turned out that native English speakers are tacitly aware of the conceptual and meaning differences between to-infinitives and corresponding gerunds and different use of the two.
