This paper explores the changing relationship between two types of construction shared by several verbs of deceiving (e.g. delude, deceive, fool), as in (a) "He deceived the public into the belief/into thinking that he would step down" versus (b) "He deceived the public that he would step down". In the course of the last few centuries, 1) nominal “interpretators” like "into the belief" have largely been replaced by verbal types like "into thinking", and 2) the interpretive phrases have increasingly been omitted in favor of type (b): directly linked content clauses functioning as arguments of the main clause verbs. We argue that this ongoing replacement process exhibits characteristics of a reductive kind of grammaticalization. As to Present-Day English, our findings indicate that the structural simplification of deceive-type sentences is more advanced in British than in American English, in particular in informal registers (spoken language and fiction). Moreover, the contexts facilitating the appearance of the incoming directly linked content clause include the use of negation and reflexive objects. Not unexpectedly, these represent a mirror-image of those conditions that have been shown to mitigate the decline of directly-linked content clauses with other verb types (e.g. congratulate and reproach).