ON THE CONSTITUENT STATUS OF INFINITIVAL COMPLEMENT CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

The paper investigates the constituent status of infinitival com-plement constructions in the contemporary English language and their infinitival counterparts in the Serbian language. The motivation for this type of research has been found in the observation that the infinitival complements in both languages are either described by the term ‘clause’ or there is no terminological specification indicating their constituent status. As this may possibly lead to inconsistencies in the treatment of infinitival complements in terms of their grammatical description, this paper attempts to determine the nature of the constituent status of infinitival complements by the use of syntactic and semantic criteria presented in Dixon (2006). Drawing from the data collected from the sources on the topic belonging to both English and Serbian linguistic traditions, the analysis has revealed that when analysed at the level of surface-syntax the infinitival constructions in English indeed represent clausal constructions both in the structural and semantic sense, while the analysis of their analogue counterparts in Serbian goes in favour of grammatically treating infinitival complements as phrasal units, while acknowledging that traces of clausality exist at the semantic level of analysis. Given the crosslinguistic nature of the research, the obtained results may serve as a contribution to the grammatical descriptions of both analysed languages, but can also be of interest to the considerations of complement constructions within typological and contrastive studies in a general sense.

Controlo e infinitivos flexionados em português L2

It is known that knowledge of the interpretative properties of the standard inflected infinitive develops late both in L1 and L2 acquisition, and that subject control with most verbs is acquired early in L1. In this study we focus on a context which has not been addressed so far, and investigate how the interpretation of the null subjects of inflected infinitival complements of subject control verbs develops in the interlanguage of Englishand Spanish-speaking learners of L2 European Portuguese. We applied a selection task to intermediate and advanced learners in order to understand whether they differentiate between inflected and uninflected infinitives in these contexts and whether they assign control properties to the inflected infinitive. Our findings show that, although learners accept the occurrence of inflected infinitives with subject control verbs and assign a controlled reading to the infinitival null subject, knowledge of some of the properties of these constructions is delayed, namely, which verbs allow inflected infinitives and what are the interpretative properties of inflected infinitival subjects under different control verbs.