@inproceedings{melnick-wasow-2019-priming,
    title = "Priming vs. Inhibition of Optional Infinitival ``to''",
    author = "Melnick, Robin  and
      Wasow, Thomas",
    editor = "Chersoni, Emmanuele  and
      Jacobs, Cassandra  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Linzen, Tal  and
      Pr{\'e}vot, Laurent  and
      Santus, Enrico",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics",
    month = jun,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Minneapolis, Minnesota",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/W19-2902/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W19-2902",
    pages = "11--19",
    abstract = "The word ``to'' that precedes verbs in English infinitives is optional in at least two environments: in what Wasow et al. (2015) previously called the ``do-be'' construction, and in the complement of ``help'', which we explore in the present work. In the ``do-be'' construction, Wasow et al. found that a preceding infinitival ``to'' increases the use of following optional ``to'', but the use of ``to'' in the complement of help is reduced following ``to help''. We examine two hypotheses regarding why the same function word is primed by prior use in one construction and inhibited in another. We then test predictions made by the two hypotheses, finding support for one of them."
}