Syntactic change and borrowing: The case of the accusative-and-infinitive construction in English

Tracing the history of deontic NCI patterns in Dutch: A case of polysemy copying

“…Arguably, the examples in (18-19) are plain passives relevantly similar to the English plain passive NCI in (7) Though there is no complete consensus on the origin of the ACI and the NCI in English and Dutch, the two late-20 th -century authorities on these structures in English historical linguistics, Warner (1982) and Fischer (1989Fischer ( , 1992Fischer ( , 1994, agree that these patterns are calques from Latin which became thoroughly entrenched in the grammar of English in the 15 th century. 4 In Dutch historical linguistics the debate on whether they are native or of Latin origin seems not to have been settled yet (for a summary and references, see Noël & Colleman 2009: 166), but there is agreement at least that when these patterns (again) acquired a certain popularity in Early Modern Dutch (between 1500 and 1650) this was due to the influence of Latin.…”

“…Our description, and the two examples, should make clear that what we are referring to is the pattern which is sometimes called the "genuine", "learned" or "Latin-type" ACI (e.g., see Fischer 1989Fischer , 1992Fischer , 1994. The term "ACI" has also been used to refer to perception verbs and causative verbs (make, let) followed by "accusatives" and bare infinitives, and mandative verbs (e.g.…”

“…The nominative-and-infinitive, or "nominativus cum infinitivo" (whence "NCI"), consists of a passive P-C-U verb complemented by a to/te-infinitive, as in (5) and (6), and is often referred to as "raising to subject". The functionality of the ACI has received a considerable amount of attention in the linguistics of English, where it is usually contrasted with that of a matrix + that-clause construction, both in a synchronic (see Noël 1997Noël , 2003; and the references there) and a diachronic perspective (see Fischer 1989Fischer , 1992Los 2005; and the references there). However, while the terms "accusative and infinitive" and "ACI" are not unusual, especially in historical English linguistics, "nominative and infinitive" and "NCI" are not commonly used in Anglophone linguistics, since the NCI pattern is usually perceived as merely the passive counterpart of the ACI and consequently is not given independent attention.…”

On the Realization of External Arguments in Infinitives

“…Although Visser (1973) gives a few examples of to-infinitives with lexical subjects in OE, Fischer (1990) argues that such examples were rare and used under Latin influence. Therefore, it would be safe to assume that toinfinitive complements were ungrammatical after do in OE.2 On the other hand, (3) and (4) indicate that do could freely take to-infinitives in ME and EModE, irrespective of whether their external arguments were lexically realized or not: However, I will put aside such examples as irrelevant to our discussion, because they were not productive and lexically restricted to the idiom do+NP+to wit/understand ('bring to somebody's knowledge').…”

“…One of the arguments comes from the fact that causative do and make could also take that-clauses as their complements in early stages of English (see Fischer (1990) and benison (1993)):…”