Finite vs. infinite Attributsätze: zu-dass-Alternation bei Substantiven

Abstract

In German, certain nouns (such as e.g. Versprechen ‘promise’ or Eigenart ‘characteristic’) can take a subordinate clause that can be realised either in finite form (as a dass-clause ‘that-clause’) or in non-finite form (as a zu-infinitive ‘to-infinitive’). We investigate the distribution of the two variants based on samples drawn from the German Reference Corpus (Kupietz et al. 2018) and the German web corpus DECOW16B (Schäfer & Bildhauer 2012), thus covering both conceptually written registers (as typically found in newspaper texts) and less formal registers (as typically found in internet forums). We first identify the conditions under which the two variants are interchangeable in the first place and subsequently investigate the factors that probabilistically govern speakers’ choices in variable contexts. Among other things, we test the hypotheses that the likelihood for the clause to be realised in non-finite form increases i) along with the quality of the control configuration, ii) in clauses not containing a modal verb (vs. those containing a modal verb), iv) in simple clauses (vs. complex clauses) and v) in newspaper texts (vs. internet forums).