earticle

영어

This paper aims to explore the difference in the conceptual distance between a minimal pair complements of to-infinitives and gerunds in English and how it is iconically reflected in syntax. When a group of English verbs takes two types of complements, the resulting minimal pair sentences are grammatical, but they show a conceptual difference.To elucidate the difference between the two complements from the perspective of iconicity, the degree of their finiteness is considered to be the linguistic distance between them and the matrix verb: to-infinitives are more finite than gerunds and thus signal more linguistic distance. Given this, a claim is made that iconicity is at work in the complement selection and that to-infinitives represent more remote conceptual distance than gerunds. To put it differently, the former connote the event which is more temporally distant in that it is what is to be realized at the reference time; they express what's more distant in mental space because they denote something specific; they also imply more emotional distance because of their marked or subjective situation