A constructional account of English small and nonfinite clauses

Kim, Jong-Bok and Rui P. Chaves. 2020. A constructional account of English small and nonfinite clauses. Lkguistic Rsemdi 37(3): 389438. The proper treatment of so-called Small Clauses (SQ including nonfinite clauses has been rather controversial in theories of English grammar. There are arguments for as well as arguments against the postulation of SCs, and multiple analytical alternatives thereof. Drawing from Pollard and Sag (1994) and Culicover and Jackendoff (2005), we argue that only a small set of English verbs allow SC complements, and that there is a large family of constructions where [NP Predicate] sequences form a constituent We depart from the latter, however, in including in this set of constructions gerundive phrases, absolute constructions, and most notably subject-auxiliary inversion constructions and SCs. We formalrze a general account of these families of constructions in HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar).