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

228 Thomas Egan
100
80
60
40
20
0
hate like love prefer
specic
general
Figure 1. Non-modalised to-infinitive constructions with matrix verbs hate, like, love and
prefer: Ratio of general to specific predications (data: BNC W ).
(2 ) I don’t like to say this but there’s a society in Glasgow buying
tickets for The children for pantomime. (BNC J8B 523)
(22) I hate to say this guys but lets compare the Irish with the
English squads for tomorrow. (BNC J G 509)
(23) They didn’t tell Martinho what the situation was for a while,
and then they preferred to get me to break it to him. (BNC H9N 2079)
In all three of these examples the complement situation encodes a specific situation
that is located in the projected future. To be more exact, it is situated in
the near projected future. Note that this construction does not overlap in sense
with the gerund construction which always locates the complement situation as a
one-off or recurrent event in the extended present.
We have already noted that the ‘love to-infinitive’ construction does not appear
to be used with this sort of forward-looking meaning. What of the other
three constructions: how often are they so used? Figure contains percentages
for all four non-modalised to-infinitive constructions, based on samples of ,000
tokens of each of the four matrix verbs downloaded at random from the written
imaginative sub-corpus of the BNC. The tokens containing non-finite complements
were extracted from these samples. The written imaginative sub-corpus was
chosen in order to facilitate comparison with the Corpus of Late Modern English
Texts, which contains a preponderance of literary texts. The percentages in Figure
are based on 70 tokens of non-modalised ‘hate to-infinitive’, 06 tokens of nonmodalised
‘like to-infinitive’, 33 tokens of non-modalised ‘love to-infinitive’ and
286 tokens of non-modalised ‘prefer to-infinitive’.
As can be seen in Figure , ‘hate to’ is the construction that occurs most frequently
with a specific as opposed to a general sense. 5 Almost half of the specific
5. In terms of actual tokens there is little difference between total numbers for ‘like to’ and ‘hate
to’ with specific complements, as may be seen by comparing Figure with Figures 2 and 4.