The purpose of this paper is to verify the hypothesis of the Great Complement Shift (GCS), according to which infinitival complement is being replaced by prepositional gerund over time. The advance of the to plus gerund (to-gerund) is considered to be the most prominent pattern of GCS (Rudanko 2010, etc.). On the basis of the Corpus of Historical American English, this paper examines the frequency changes from the 1820s to the 2000s involving eight predicates expected to have undergone GCS. It turns out that object and confine have completed the change in the early twentieth century and only to-gerund is used now. The predicates consent, prone and look forward have partially undergone GCS: among them look forward is in the front line and to-gerund overtook to-infinitive in the 1850s and have since spread rapidly; with consent and prone, to-infinitive is still used more frequently but to-gerund is increasing and to-infinitive is slightly decreasing over time. The verbs agree, assent and aspire differ from the others in that to-infinitive has not decreased at all. Since to-gerund is slightly increasing with these verbs, GCS is still justified but not at the expense of to-infinitive.

Hee-Jung Lee. 2016. An Analysis of English Gerund Construction on the Basis of Gradience. Studies in Modern Grammar 90, 45-67. The purpose of this paper is to analyze gerund construction on the basis of gradience which was proposed by Aarts (2007, 2008), comparing with previous studies such as HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) approach and WG (Word Grammar) approach under multiple default inheritance. This paper explores syntactic properties of gerunds which have both nominal and verbal nature. The nominal nature of gerunds concerns with external patterns to the gerunds, and the verbal nature of gerunds concerns with their internal patterns. Keeping these properties in mind, this paper examines the logic of multiple default inheritance which allows a single node to inherit from two supercategories, in this case from both noun and verb, and then points out some problems. The paper introduces an alternative analysis, that is, the gradience approach, and argues that English gerunds can be explained neatly by the notion of intersective gradience which makes use of the concept of convergence. Above all, this paper devises a gradient diagram on the basis of basic explanations, and ensures that this diagram can help students to understand confusing gerunds.