The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

subsidiary factors at work without which these individual developments mightnot have taken place. Let us first have a look at the situation in Old English.In Old English (as in present-day English and other Germanic languages),one would regularly come across constructions such as:(15) a. a geseah heo æt cildh licgan on binnethen saw she the child liegan in manger‘then she saw the child lying in the manger’ (ÆCHom I. 2.42.24)b. ic geseah hwilon e tæcan am cildumI saw once you teach the children‘I once saw you teach(ing) the children’(uidi aliquando te docuisse pueros) (ÆGram 150.13)where, semantically, æt cild and e ‘you’ are as much objects of geseah, as theyare subjects of the infinitive, licgan and tæcan. However, we do not findconstructions like (16) in Old English (or in German and Dutch):(16) She believed the event to be of minor importanceChanges in infinitival constructions 221Here the NP the event has no direct syntactic or semantic relation with the verbbelieve. Both the perception verbs in (15) and the verbs of the believe type in(16) are essentially monotransitive verbs: they select one complement,expressed as a NP or some type of clause. But there are differences toobetween the two types of verbs. Whereas ic geseah e is structurally a completeutterance with a meaning similar to (15b), in which the infinitive is predicatedon the direct object, a sentence such as she believed the event is clearly defectivein that it represents a different meaning compared to (16). 4 Thus, Ælfricin his Grammar, translates the Latin AcI in (15b) by an AcI in Old English,but he does not do so in (17):(17) uideo te docturum esse [INF]ic geseo æt u wylt tæcan‘I see that you will/are going to teach (ÆGram 150.16)’Here, ic geseo e would not be an equivalent utterance: the speaker cannotactually see the addressee in the activity of teaching because that activity willtake place in the future.4We are not implying that there is no relation at all between the matrix verb and thefollowing NP, event. Bolinger (1967) has argued convincingly that some relation mustexist, or we could not account for the fact that a verb like believe accepts e.g. I believeJohn to be a man ofintegrity, while I believe you to think I am lying, is distinctly odd,if not unacceptable (examples taken from Bolinger). But this distinction involves thenature of the predicate selected, rather than the choice of subject. In other words, thenature of the secondary predicate imposes constraints on the structure selected bythe matrix verb (i.e. the choice between infinitival structures and that-clauses). Apartfrom that, it is most likely that discourse factors play a role here too, as Noël (1997)has shown convincingly.