“Few people can have seen it” – an investigation into an allegedly non-normative construction with can and the perfect infinitive
“Few people can have seen it” – an investigation into an allegedly non-normative construction with can and the perfect infinitive

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses an investigation into the English modal predicate with can and the perfect infinitive form of the main verb. The study uses language samples excerpted from The Corpus of Contemporary American English, as well as selected data from The Corpus of Historical American English and The British National Corpus. English grammars tend not to discuss can with the perfect infinitive, which can give an impression that it does not exist. Nevertheless, the reported study confirms that can with the perfect infinitive is present in both American and British Englishes, mainly in formal, written communication. In the US, it was used already at the beginning of the 19th century. Furthermore, can with the perfect infinitive expresses either the speaker’s reasoning about a hypothetical past situation or speaker’s certainty that a situation did not take place in the past. Thus, can interacts with the perfect and yields epistemic readings. Additionally, subject negation extends its scope over the proposition. The propositional negation interacts with can, thus producing the meaning of speaker’s certainty. Finally, the findings of the study are used to determine the norms which may underlie the modal predicate with can and the perfect infinitive.

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