Om-omission in Dutch verbal complements

The complementizer om, which heads to-infinitival clauses in Dutch, is optional if the clause it introduces is a complement. We investigate which linguistic features influence the distribution of om in this construction, using data collected from an automatically parsed corpus of Dutch. A large part of the variation in the distribution of om is accounted for by the governing verb. In addition to this, features that account for syntactic or processing complexity play a significant role as well as features that characterize typical complement clauses for a given governor and typical purpose or goal modifier clauses. The fact that lexical variation plays a dominant role in our model motivates our choice for a mixed effects logistic regression model, where verbs are used as random effects.