영어 모문동사와 보충어의 내재의미 자질일치

The Internal Semantic Feature Agreement between a Matrix Verb and Its Complement in English

The purpose of this study is to explore the internal semantic feature agreement between a matrix verb and its complement in English. As a complement, the forms of an object are varied such as DP, that-clause, to-infinitive clause and gerundive clause. Every matrix verb, however, can't select these types of object freely as its complement. There appear to be formal and selectional restrictions based on syntactic-semantic properties between each verb and its complement when a matrix verb selects its object as a complement. This restriction is referred to as 'internal semantic feature agreement' between an matrix verb and its complement. So as to examine and understand such feature agreement in principle, I attempted to verify it by using a corpus. The resulting corpus analyses show that a DP is selected by the class of matrix verbs whose inherent semantic properties denote 'reference-feature', a that-clause 'proposition feature', a to-infinitive clause 'future feature', and a gerundive clause 'past feature'. This study shows that the internal semantic feature agreement plays an important role in the merger process of a complement into a matrix verb.