<i>HELP</i>or<i>HELP to</i>: What Do Corpora Have to Say?

Abstract

For example, all of the authors who provide a poorer account of HELP maintain the choice of a full or bare infinitive after HELP is determined by a semantic distinction between the two -this is not the case (cf.section 4).In this paper we will take a corpus-based approach to improve the description of the verb and to test claims made about the verb in the literature.We will also explore variation in that description between two major varieties of English, British English (BrE) and American English (AmE).In addition, we will investigate how HELP has varied diachronically and by register in these varieties.First, however, the claim that HELP is a frequent verb of English with distinctive syntactic properties must be justified.HELP is one of the most frequent words in the English language, ranking as 245 th in the word frequency list of the British National Corpus (BNC). 2 When its inflected forms helped, helps and helping are included, there are 528.62 instances of HELP per million words.When we look at the most frequent verbs (lemmatized) in the BNC, HELP rises to 72 nd in the word frequency list.