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

226 Thomas Egan
( ) However, no money was to be spent on florists’ bouquets or
wreaths, and in any case we’d both always hated to see flowers
wired and thrust into stiff, unnatural arrangements. (BNC CES 5 3)
( 2) I always prefer to pay all my bills by cheque or by hand. (BNC BNL 53)
There is no consensus in the literature about how to specify the meaning of utterances
like (9)–( 2). Duffley ( 992, 2006), for instance, ascribes to them a ‘future’
sense. Huddleston and Pullum (2002) maintain that they evoke the idea of (repeated)
change. De Smet and Cuyckens (2005), writing about the matrix verbs like
and love, argue that these encode a network of meanings including habituality and
enjoyment. Carter and McCarthy (2006) write:
Hate, like, love and prefer can be followed by either -ing or a to-infinitive.
The difference in meaning is often not great, but -ing emphasises the action or
event in itself, while the infinitive places the emphasis more on the results of the
action or event. (Carter and McCarthy 2006: 5 5)
I propose that constructions like these with non-modalised matrix verbs and
to-infinitive complements should be analysed as encoding what Langacker ( 999)
calls general validity predications. He characterises these as follows:
The situation they describe may hold for either a bounded or an unbounded span
of time, i.e., their validity has a temporal scope. An indefinite, potentially openended
set of instances of the basic event type can occur within that scope. General
validity predications do not however profile these instances, but rather the higher-order
relationship (of genericity/habituality) that they constitute or manifest.
(Langacker 999: 249–250)
This characterisation seems to encapsulate neatly the sense of such tokens as
(9)–( 2). General validity predications are higher order predications. As such
they do not encode the actual realisation of the complement situation. However,
they are often accompanied by an adverbial indicating the likely occasion of its
realisation. For instance, all four tokens (9)–( 2) contain the adverb always. This
indicates that the complement situations are likely to be realised on all suitable occasions.
In (9), for instance, the exchange of information may be presumed to take
place during intimate conversations between the two parties concerned. And in
( 0) the speaker questions the addressee about the possible existence of this sort
of occasion. A variety of adverbials may be used to encode the likely occasions
of realisation of general validity predications. ( 3)–( 6), for instance, contain
(underlined) ‘time-when’ adverbials.
( 3) And when the flat’s not in use for entertaining clients I like to
make it available to all my employees. (BNC H8S 333)