Oskar Gawlik Jan Kochanowski University “On the complementation of start, begin and continue in spoken academic American English.”
ABSTRACT
The main goal of this article is to present the results of a linguistic inquiry into the syntax of start, begin and continue in contemporary spoken academic American English. The main goal of the study was to determine the frequency of occurrence of these verbs and their preferred non-finite complements – the gerund form and the present infinitive form – in that variety of English. The incidence of start, begin and continue was investigated in both small and large lectures in the MICASE corpus. The precepts of corpus linguistics have together served as the major methodological tool. The audience targeted here includes theoretical and applied linguists interested in English linguistics as well as students of the discipline and scholars of related fields.