Verb complementation: shift of complementation

Verb complementation is one of major research fields. I started working with verbs of implicit negation as an extension from my research into negation in general. However, I started to feel that verb complementation itself needs further investigation. I am particularly interested in the shift of complementation in the history of English.

Book

I have so far published one book in the field of verb complementation.

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2010. Verbs of Implicit Negation and their Complements in the History of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

This book describes the history of complementation by analyzing the following verbs of implicit negation: forbid, refuse, forbear, avoid, prohibit, prevent, hinder, refrain, fear, doubt, deny. The data analysis shows that the shift of complementation, which often, though not always, leads to the expansion of –ing forms, is particularly noticeable in the Modern English period. While some verbs develop prepositional –ing constructions, others do not. The book as a whole demonstrates how important it is to deal with different verbs carefully in the examination of complementation patterns.

Complementation of individual verbs

Forbid is one my favourite verbs. I started to feel interested in complementation while examining the history of this verbs. I have, therefore, published several works on its complementation:

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2003. “‘God forbid!’: A Historical Study of the Verb forbid in Different Versions of the English Bible”. Journal of English Linguistics 31: 149-62.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2011. “Early Modern English Prose Selections: Directions in Historical Corpus Linguistics”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 50: 133-199. (Downloadable PDF)
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2017. “Recent Changes in the Use of the Verb forbid“. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 56: 195-218. (Downloadable PDF)

I have also written a few articles on the complementation of causative make. It is followed by bare infinitives in today’s English, whereas in earlier English, the use of to-infinitives was very common. I have investigated Late Middle English and Early Modern English about this research topic.

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2012. “The Complements of Causative make in Late Middle English”, in Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics: A Multi-dimensional Approach, ed. Manfred Markus, Yoko Iyeiri, Reinhard Heuberger, & Emil Chamson, pp. 59-73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2018. “Causative Make and its Infinitival Complements in Early Modern English”, in Explorations in English Historical Syntax, ed. Hubert Cuyckens, Hendrik De Smet, Liesbet Heyvaert and Charlotte Maekelberghe, pp. 139-157. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

The first of the above is based on ICAMET and the second on EMEPS (Early Modern English Prose Selections).

Pray is another verb that I have worked on. I have so far published the following papers, where I discuss not only its complementation but its use for discourse purposes:

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2009. ”The Verb pray in Different Letters of the Paston Family with Special Reference to its Pragmatic Use”, in English Philology and Corpus Studies: A Festschrift in Honour of Mitsunori Imai to Celebrate his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Shinichiro Watanabe & Yukiteru Hosoya, pp. 169-83. Tokyo: Shohakusha.
• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2013. “The Verb pray in Chaucer and Caxton”, in Approaching Language Variation through Corpora: A Festschrift in Honour of Toshio Saito, ed. Shunji Yamazaki & Robert Sigley, pp. 289-306. Bern: Peter Lang.

I have also written extensively on the verb pray and its complementation in  Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025). Here I also discuss its relationship with please.

Furthermore, I have investigated various other verbs more sporadically. Try is one of them. In the following publication, I have focused particularly on the two constructions, try to do … and try and do …. Although the latter is considered to be more typical of British English, it is attested in the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English. The article shows that its distribution seems to differ depending on the style of spoken English:

• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, and Yasumasa Baba. 2013. “Try to do and try and do Again: Verb Complementation in Spoken American English”. Kyoto Working Papers in English and General Linguistics 2: Special Issue in Honour of Professor Keinsei Sugayama on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday,ed. Michiko Yaguchi, Hiroyuki Takagi, Kairi Igarashi, Tsutomu Watanabe, Takafumi Maekawa, and Taiki Yoshimura, pp. 265-79, Tokyo: Kaitakusha.

Likewise, I have investigated the complementation of convince in Present-day English. The paper given below explores how its infinitival construction increased in recent English:

• Iyeiri, Yoko. 2012. “To Convince Someone To Do Something in Present-Day American English”, in Kotoba to Kokoro no Tankyu (Inquiries into Language and Mind: A Festschrift for Professor Toshiaki Inada on the Occasion of His Retirement from Kyushu University), ed. Hiroshi Ohashi, Tomoyuki Kubo, Nobuaki Nishioka, Yoshihiro Munemasa, and Haruhiko Murao, pp. 363-376. Tokyo: Kaitakusha. (Downloadable PDF)