The «for...to» construction in English

In this monograph, thefor...toconstruction has been interpreted as a non-finite syntagm expressing a proposition, e.g.My greatest wish is for father to be happy. The element following the clause-initialforfunctions semantically as the subject of the proposition, whilst theto- infinitive represents its predicate. As part of a sentence, thefor...toconstruction appears in three grammatical roles: as an adverbial, as the complement of a predicator and as a noun modifier. The monograph aims to describe this non-finite verb structure for British English on the basis of an extensive corpus of authentic written texts, and to compare it with that of American English in regard to some of the problems raised. Thefor...toconstruction exists alongside other types of complement in English. We have compared thefor...tosyntagm with thethatclause, the sequence of object plusto- infinitive and theto- infinitive without a subject. These four types of complement can be distinguished from one another along a continuum which grades them on a scale according to the degree of grammatical independence of the complement from the superordinate clause.