Do We Have Two Different Allows? - on animacy induced variations with allow

Abstract

When allow takes an infinitival complement, there is always a noun phrase preceding the to-infinitive clause. Many people implicitly assume that allow behaves like persuade when it takes an infinitival complement,interpreting this postverbal noun phrase as the affected theme of the main verb allow, just as the noun phrase following persuade is interpreted as the target of persuasion. But Aarts (2001) provides interesting evidence showing that allow is different from persuade and concludes that allow is actually more like believe than persuade. This squib shows that Aarts is only partially right and allow can take double complement structures (like persuade) as well as single complement structures (like want or believe) depending on the nature of the postverbal noun phrase. More precisely, it will be proposed that when the noun phrase is [+animate], allow can take either the double or single complement structure but when the noun phrase is [-animate], it can take only a single complement structure. Also discussed are the exact nature of this single complement structure and a potential problem residing in the proposed analysis. Keywords: infinitival