Infinitival complements of the verb help in present-day spoken British English

The thesis investigates the use of the bare infinitive and to-infinitive as a complement of the verb help in present-day spoken British English. It focuses on the frequency of each form of the infinitive and on factors influencing the choice between them. Material for the analysis is extracted from the corpus Spoken BNC2014. The theoretical part defines the infinitive, describes its forms and functions, and introduces different approaches to infinitival complements of help together with the studies concerned with them. The analysis consists of two parts. In the quantitative part the frequency of the construction ‚help + (NP) + bare infinitive' and ‚help + (NP) + to-infinitive' is determined. The qualitative part analyses these constructions in terms of factors influencing the choice of the infinitive form after help, as they were described in secondary literature. Except for the factors adopted from secondary literature, attention is paid to other features connected to the individual constructions. key words: complementation of the verb help, bare infinitive, to-infinitive, factors influencing the choice of the infinitive form, present-day spoken British Englis