Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Emotion verbs with to-infinitive complements 225
stronger. The opposite is the case with the ‘would hate to-infinitive’ construction.
This resembles a verb of not-wanting. 4 Thus the last thing the subject in (3)
would like to experience is the loss of his or her films. The construction in (4) also
encodes wanting: to be specific it encodes wanting the situation encoded in the
complement clause more than some explicit or implicit alternative(s).
When, on the other hand, these four verbs occur with gerunds, they locate the
complement predication, which may be either serial (recurrent) or one-off, in the
extended present. (5)–(8) illustrate these same-time predications.
(5) A letter from your Aunt Emily told us how much
she likes having you and how accomplished you are becoming.
(BNC H8X 203)
(6) She loves gossiping with friends over lunch, he would rather
be alone with his thoughts. (BNC CBC 044 )
(7) ‘In my experience’, she mimicked, ‘men hate hanging around
while women shop.’ (BNC HHA 2446)
(8) ‘Some women prefer seeing make [sic] gynaecologists because
they find them more authoritative.’ (BNC G2V 972)
As was pointed out by Kiparsky and Kiparsky ( 97 ), matrix verbs like these
are factive when they occur with gerund complements. In each case the subject
engages in the activity encoded in the complement predication on one or more
occasions, and this participation evokes simultaneous pleasure or displeasure as
the case may be. Thus in (6) the subject in question does gossip, and when she does
so this activity affords her a great deal of pleasure. Similarly, in (7) the subjects do
hang around but in this case the activity affords them displeasure.
The third type of construction containing these matrix verbs consists of
to-infinitive complements following non-modalised matrix verbs. These are
illustrated by (9)–( 2).
(9) He always liked to tell me things about my lover that my lover
kept from me. (BNC FAT 2835)
( 0) Is there a certain time when you always love to sit down with a
relaxing drink and something to eat? (BNC AD0 563)
4. In addition to being situated in the projected future the complement situation in the ‘would
hate to’ construction may also be located in irrealis proper. It may even be counter-factual, as in
“I would hate to be in the royal family” (BNC KSS 459). Both ‘would prefer to’ and ‘would love
to’ may occasionally be employed to encode propositions like these.