Distribution of infinitives in contemporary British English: A study based on the British ICE corpus

The one-million-word British component of the International Corpus of English contains both spoken and written material of educated contemporary British English. With its range of text categories and its detailed word-class annotation, this corpus offers an ideal basis for various linguistic studies. This paper investigates the distribution of infinitives across the categories in the corpus and seeks to find out whether and to what extent this distribution can be used to discriminate between written and spoken English. © 1995 Oxford University Press.