“To Convince Someone To Do Something in Present-Day American English”

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Convince and its complementation patterns, historical and contemporary

This paper explores the recent rise of the “convince + someone + to-infinitive” construction. Existing studies and usage guides state that the construction is on the increase in today’s English, particularly in American English. According to Peters (2004: 418), it appeared in American English during the 1950s. The present study is based on three corpora: (1) the 1930s-1950s and 1970s-1990s data of the TIME Corpus; (2) the 1990s data of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA); and (3) The Oxford English Dictionary quotation base.

The results of the analysis include: the to-infinitival construction is attested in the contemporary data examined, but not so common in the TIME Corpus; it is more common in the academic and spoken data of COCA; there is a noticeable gap between the active voice, where the new construction is relatively common, and the passive voice, where its use is extremely restricted. On the bases of these finding, I argues that the rise of this construction was probably influenced by the construction the verb persuade takes, since the meaning shift of convince is observed in the direction of ‘persuade’. At the same time, I would also argue that it is important to note that to-infinitival constructions are attested, though in a minor way, in the 16th- and 17th-data of the Oxford English Dictionary quotation base, which may have paved a way for its expansion at a later stage. The verb convince is not necessarily used in the sense ‘persuade’ in these earlier examples.

Concerning the overall complement shift of this verb, I also discuss the development of the comment clause use of I am convinced.