Fear, dread and horror aequi

What motivates the non-finite complementation of apprehension verbs?

Abstract

Apprehension predicates, such as the verbs fear and dread or adjectives afraid or terrified, can combine with a number of complementation patterns, including to-infinitives, bare and prepositional gerunds, as well as finite clauses. In many cases there is no immediately apparent difference in function between the alternative constructions. Still, they are characterized by their own sets of collocations, syntactic idiosyncrasies and specific pragmatic functions, which suggests that the complement choice is conditioned by a number of probabilistic factors. The aim of this study is to investigate selected variables affecting the choice of the non-finite complements of the verbs fear and dread, the to-infinitive and the –ing form. Logistic regression is applied to data from the COCA corpus in order to establish the relative importance and statistical significance of a range of factors, from strictly syntactic constraints, including the horror aequi principle and extraction, through semantic aspects such as volition, to pragmatics, specifically the implicativity of the constructions. The study investigates if the choice of non-finite complement constructions with fear and dread is affected by the same set of factors, or whether there is a specific type of motivation – semantic, syntactic, lexical or pragmatic – that prevails with each of the two analyzed verbs.