The Nominative and Infinitive in Late Modern English

Abstract

The English nominative and infinitive pattern (NCI), consisting of a passive utterance, cognition or perception verb followed by a to-infinitive, is the formal realization of at least three form-meaning pairings (or “constructions”). One of these is simply an instantiation of the passive construction. The other two have a “qualificational” function and are used to offer descriptions or serve as evidentiality markers. Although from a synchronic perspective the “evidential NCI construction” can be construed as a grammaticalization of the passive NCI, no such grammaticalization has taken place in English: Like the passive NCI, the evidential NCI is a borrowing from Latin. From a diachronic construction grammatical perspective, an investigation of the English history of the NCI pattern can still be interesting, however, in that it can reveal changes in the distribution of the pattern over different genres and provide evidence for its growing schematicity. This illustrates the complementarity of grammaticalization theory and diachronic construction grammar.