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

Emotion verbs with to-infinitive complements 227
( 4) When we are hungry we love to eat bread. (BNC HS7 263)
( 5) Jannie instinctively hid her cigarette behind her back when the
kitchen door opened; John hated to see her smoking while she
cooked. (BNC G 2 2)
( 6) I like to wake up to a cup of Assam, a very robust tea, or a
strong blend of African and Indian teas of the type that makes a
good English breakfast blend; in the evening I prefer to drink
Keemun or Lapsang Souchong. (BNC ABB 727)
In examples ( 3)–( 6) the likely occasions of realisation are all encoded explicitly.
There are also many cases in which the times when the actions encoded by the
to-infinitives are likely to be realised are implicit. In such cases our rule of thumb
as language users, our working hypothesis, is that they are likely to be realised, or
in the case of hate not realised, on appropriate occasions. We must make use of the
context or of our world knowledge to identify the sort of occasion that is meant in
any particular instance. ( 7)–(20) are cases in point.
( 7) Relatives hated to see a sheet over the faces of their loved
ones. (BNC JYB 472)
( 8) There is very little connection now between our people and
you Europeans. We prefer to take our husbands from among
each other. (BNC CJD 94)
( 9) Harry loves to talk about his gardening exploits. (BNC ACY 85 )
(20) And nowadays coaches had lavatories and armchairs and dear
little hostesses whom Laura liked to induce to tell her their life
stories. (BNC CMJ 00 )
Our interpretation of what constitutes suitable occasions is naturally informed by
our encyclopaedic knowledge of the event types in question. Even without access
to the context, we know that the situation in ( 7) is likely to take place in a mortuary,
the situation in ( 8) on the occasion of choosing a marriage partner, and the
situations in ( 9)–(20) whenever the subjects in question can find a willing ear.
The point is that, unlike the construction with gerund complements exemplified
in (5)–(8), none of these tokens encode the actual realisation of the complement
situations. Rather, they all encode a higher order predication of the likelihood of
their being realised in the appropriate circumstances.
There is no doubt that non-modalised emotion matrix verbs with to-infinitive
complements in Present-day English typically encode general predications (see
Figure and Duffley 2006: 77). However, they do not invariably do so, or at least
three of them, the exception being love, do not always do so. (2 )–(23) exemplify
some exceptions.