The construction cannot help -ing and its rivals in Modern English
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Günter Rohdenburg
Abstract
This paper describes the history and present status of a family of constructions containing two older (obsolescent and recessive) members, cannot choose but + bare infinitive and cannot but + bare infinitive, and two younger ones, cannot help -ing and cannot help but + bare infinitive. It is shown that cannot help but + bare infinitive constitutes an American-led innovation and that even today the type is distinctly more common and versatile in American than British English. In addition, the paper explores some major distributional constraints distinguishing between cannot help -ing and the three but-types. These involve differences between individual text types, the lexical diversity of the non-finite verb, and certain non-basic, especially Low Transitivity structures.
Abstract
This paper describes the history and present status of a family of constructions containing two older (obsolescent and recessive) members, cannot choose but + bare infinitive and cannot but + bare infinitive, and two younger ones, cannot help -ing and cannot help but + bare infinitive. It is shown that cannot help but + bare infinitive constitutes an American-led innovation and that even today the type is distinctly more common and versatile in American than British English. In addition, the paper explores some major distributional constraints distinguishing between cannot help -ing and the three but-types. These involve differences between individual text types, the lexical diversity of the non-finite verb, and certain non-basic, especially Low Transitivity structures.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of contributors vii
- Introduction 1
-
Sequence and order
- Sequence and order 13
- Mom and Dad but Men and Women 35
- Sequences of size adjectives in text 47
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Competing constructions
- The competition between the intensifiers dead and deadly 71
- Has go -V ousted go-and -V? 91
- The construction cannot help -ing and its rivals in Modern English 113
- From reduction to emancipation 133
- Complex prepositions and variation within the PNP construction 153
-
Emerging patterns
- A finer definition of neology in English 177
- A corpus-based study of gender assignment in recent English loanwords in Norwegian 209
- The return of the prefix? New verb-particle combinations in blogs 223
-
Correlating patterns and meaning
- Modality and the V wh pattern 247
- Assessing corpus search methods in onomasiological investigations 271
- Author index 293
- Subject index 297
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- List of contributors vii
- Introduction 1
-
Sequence and order
- Sequence and order 13
- Mom and Dad but Men and Women 35
- Sequences of size adjectives in text 47
-
Competing constructions
- The competition between the intensifiers dead and deadly 71
- Has go -V ousted go-and -V? 91
- The construction cannot help -ing and its rivals in Modern English 113
- From reduction to emancipation 133
- Complex prepositions and variation within the PNP construction 153
-
Emerging patterns
- A finer definition of neology in English 177
- A corpus-based study of gender assignment in recent English loanwords in Norwegian 209
- The return of the prefix? New verb-particle combinations in blogs 223
-
Correlating patterns and meaning
- Modality and the V wh pattern 247
- Assessing corpus search methods in onomasiological investigations 271
- Author index 293
- Subject index 297
