English Verb Complementation

For the greater part of the 20th century, grammarians have been occupied with the question of how to arrange the facts of a language - ie, with the theory of grammar - rather than with the facts themselves in the way of frequency & stylistic or regional distribution of forms. By the time the Quirk group of linguists in London brought out the first & second versions of their English grammar (A Grammar of Contemporary English [1972] & A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language [1985]), the generative grammarians were still working on principles of procedure. Andrew Radford, closely following Noam Chomsky, published three bulky introductory volumes, the later ones superseding their predecessors, in 1981, 1988, & 1997. This article examines the two lines of approach with regard to English verb complementation (eg, I would like you to teach grammar, I found them working on the matter) & comes to the conclusion that the authors of "the London Grammar" are guilty of serious mishandling of certain structures, but that, on the whole, their work is superior to what the generativists have to offer (the basic reference for this is Radford, 1997). In fact, the latter turn out to be masters of estrangement effects, by inventing new terms & "derivations" for familiar syntactic phenomena without being able to supply a description of verb complementation that will satisfy future theoretical demands of corpus linguistics. Some improvements within the framework of the London Grammar are suggested, which are, to a considerable extent, a vindication of Frank Palmer's model of "catenatives" in The English Verb (2nd edition, 1988). 3 Tables, 32 References. Adapted from the source document