The Use of Infinitives in Academic and Newspaper Discourse

Abstract

This diploma thesis focuses on the analysis of to-infinitive structures in academic and newspaper discourse. The theoretical part of this work first defines the main functions and linguistic features of the two discourse types, then briefly addresses the differences between finite and non-finite verbs, and lastly describes the infinitive in detail, with special focus on the many different clausal constructions it may be part of. The practical part then analyzes data found in authentic academic and newspaper texts and tries to explain the prevailing tendencies in relation to discourse type. The main goal of the analysis is to find out which of the two corpora the use of infinitives is more common in and why.