Abstract
Chapter 4 investigates the non-finite complements of the adjective afraid in American and British English, using data from selected decades of the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. The to infinitive and of -ing complements are tracked from the 1820s to the 2000s, and the Choice Principle is applied to the corpus data to explain the distribution of the two competing patterns. The notion of affective stance in negative contexts is also considered as a possible factor responsible for the continuing dominance of the to infinitive over the of -ing complement with afraid—a development at odds with the general principles of the Great Complement Shift.
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Notes
- 1.
While it is quite possible to find examples of words falling between afraid and to/of, or between to/of and the following verb, supplementary searches to capture all such tokens were not carried out in the present chapter. In the authors’ opinion, the data obtained from the simple search string alone offers a suitable perspective on the situation, retrieving sufficient numbers of tokens for the purposes of the present study.
- 2.
It may be possible to regard the construction “not afraid to …” as an “affect key,” in the sense of Ochs and Schieffelin (1989) and earlier work. As Ochs and Schieffelin (1989, 15) point out , affect keys may index a range of emotions and attitudes, including “anger, sarcasm, disappointment, sadness, pleasure, humor” and so on. Defiance in the face of difficulty or opposition is not included in their list, but seems a conceivable addition.
- 3.
From a constructional perspective, it may be noted that constructions can be identified at different structural levels of complexity (see de Smet 2008, 65; 2013, 34–35). It then seems possible to say that in the case of the pattern “not afraid to Verb,” the higher level construction comprising not only the to infinitive clause but also the negation and the matrix adjective afraid exerts, or may exert, a more pervasive effect on semantic or pragmatic interpretation than what occurs in the case of the “not afraid of V-ing” construction. In the latter case the lower level constructions—including both the adjective as a construction and the of -ing complement as a construction—maintain more of their independence and the higher level construction is less amenable to being interpreted as a reactive stance construction.
The constructional perspective brings to the fore the question of why a reactive interpretation should arise more readily in the case of the to infinitive pattern, and not in the case of the of -ing pattern. This question will deserve attention. One line of inquiry would be to investigate whether the larger syntactic boundary between the matrix adjective and the clausal complement in the gerundial pattern might be a factor protecting the relative independence of the lower-level construction in the case of the gerundial pattern.
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Rickman, P., Rudanko, J. (2018). Semantic Roles and Complement Selection: A Case Study of the Adjective Afraid . In: Corpus-Based Studies on Non-Finite Complements in Recent English. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72989-3_4
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