Gerunds vs. infinitives in English: Not meaning but form

Abstract

English gerunds and infinitives are often treated as nearly equivalent ways of using verb phrases as syntactic subjects and objects, even though this assumption is falsified by the actual grammatical patterns. Gerunds are indeed verb phrases that appear in all positions of freely expandable noun phrases, but infinitives and finite clauses, termed 'verbal clauses' in this study, actually never occur in noun phrase positions. What is shown here is that (i) verbal clauses that appear to be 'objects' of verbs are in clause-final position, rather than in the position of object noun phrases, and that (ii) initial verbal clauses that appear to be 'subjects' are in a pre-subject position where they bind a null expletive subject. The hypothesis in (ii) is tested and confirmed by showing that initial verbal clauses, in contrast to lexical noun phrase and gerunds, never occur in embedded or inverted subject positions. In this way, initial verbal clauses have the same distribution as other well-known 'root' or 'focus' constructions, which in pre-subject position are limited to main clauses.