Help vs help to: a multifactorial, mixed-effects account of infinitive marker omission

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the alternation between the bare and the full infinitive with the verb help in English. In particular, the influence of three general principles proposed to underlie this case of variation is investigated and discussed, viz. the complexity principle, the distance principle and avoidance of identity effects. A multifactorial analysis of corpus data from the BNC, which allows for the determination of the different strengths of determinants, reveals that the present alternation is governed to a large degree by horror aequi, the avoidance of identity on the lexical level.