The relevance of complement choice: A corpus study of ‘believe’

This paper considers the alternation between ‘that’- and ‘to’-complements with ‘believe’. Besides providing a theoretical explanation for previous findings that relate the alternation to textual structure and rhetorical intentions, novel hypotheses are also presented and confirmed through a corpus analysis. This analysis shows that the ‘to’-/‘that’-complement alternation is sensitive to whether the writer intends the reader to focus on the implications of the proposition expressed by the embedded clause, or on those of the proposition expressed by the sentence as a whole.