earticle

영어

Some infinitives in English are classified as raising and others as control. In some infinitival constructions, both of these characteristics are present. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the variation in control structures with a survey asking acceptability judgments from English native speakers and verify the survey results conducted earlier by Hendrick (2020). Hendrick (2020) attempted to figure out the pattern of the variation in raising and control structures through a survey of acceptability judgments. Similar results were obtained using the same questionnaire as Hendrick (2020). The survey items were manipulated with the expletives there and it and control predicates promise, try, allow, and force. Contrary to the standard syntactic theory, both expletives there and it were accepted in control structures though they were more likely to be rejected than accepted. Both expletives appeared to be more accepted in the object position. These two properties were common. The expletive there was more likely to be accepted in Hendrick’s (2020), but while the expletive there seemed more accepted in subject position, the expletive it was preferred in object position in our survey results. This paper explained the variation in terms of thematic relations and the survive principle.