A Corpus Study of Recent Changes of the Nonfinite Complementation of Remember and Forget in English

영어 Remember와 Forget의 비한정 보충의 최근 변화에 대한 코퍼스 연구

The objective of this paper is to investigate diachronic changes for the past two centuries in nonfinite complementation of the English verbs remember and forget. COHA (Corpus of Historical American English) was used to examine the frequency changes of several types of nonfinite complements and their competitors. Our findings are as follows: (1) the use of the gerund complement of remember has increased over time; (2) the gerund has never been in competition with the present infinitive as a complement of remember, which can be verified in terms of either their nonequivalent meanings or the patterns of their frequency changes; (3) during the early 1800s remember+gerund was equally competing with remember+perfect infinitive, but since then the gerund outdid and the two competitors progressed oppositely. In Present-Day English remember+gerund has almost completely replaced remember+perfect infinitive; (4) although remember+present gerund was equivalent in meaning with remember+perfect gerund, the latter has never been equally competing with the former, and therefore the increase of the use of the (present) gerund has nothing to do with that of the perfect gerund; (5) the increase of remember+gerund has no significant relationship with the use of remember+finite complement (i.e. that-clause). (6) the frequency of forget+gerund was very low, especially compared with that of forget+infinitive. (7) forget+ perfect infinitive has never used, and forget+perfect gerund was extremely low. All these show that two different lexical items, even though sharing many semantic features, develop along different paths over time, and no sweeping generalization is derived for these historical changes.