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This paper is a study of the expression can help, meaning ‘can refrain/ avoid’. It focuses on the polarity and the fixedness of this expression and on its complex complementation. A diachronic corpus study shows that this item is no longer best described as a negative polarity item and that it has undergone a process of lexicalization. The second half of this article deals with the complex complementation of can (-ed) not help and, more specifically, with the can (-ed) not help but V-structure. This structure is extragrammatical because there exists no similar construction in contemporary English. However, as will be shown, its use has recently increased at the expense of can (-ed) not help + gerund. This paper will demonstrate that a combination of sociolinguistic, semantic and pragmatic factors, coupled with criteria related to processing ease, may have played a decisive part in this somewhat paradoxical success.

The paradoxical success of can (-ed) not help but V: When the extragrammatical meets the non-compositional