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

Emotion verbs with to-infinitive complements 229
complement predicates in the ‘hate to’ construction encode acts of communication
as in (22). One typically hates to say, admit or mention something, and then
proceeds to do just that! The same types of complement predicate are even more
frequent with negated ‘like to’, as in (2 ). The only other context in which ‘like to’
occurs in Present-day English with a specific complement is in if-suggestions, as
in (24). Negatives and suggestions also account for a third of the tokens of specific
‘prefer to’, but in its case we also find affirmative matrix verbs in the simple past as
in (23), in the present as in (25) and as a participle as in (26).
(24) And if you like to check yours now just okay. (BNC KLW 3 6)
(25) If I have any further requests, I prefer to make them to him personally.
(BNC GW2 68)
(26) He refused the offer of any sword, preferring to use the blade
he had forged with his own hands. (BNC CM 2238)
Note that all these tokens ((2 )–(26)) encode forward-looking predications. In
Section 4 we will see that these constructions were not restricted to specific predication
in the projected future in Late Modern English. But before we do so, we
will look at the overall incidence of the non-modalised to-infinitive constructions
compared to their modalised and -ing counterparts over the last 300 years.
. The historical development of all three construction types
Although the topic proper of this paper is the use of to-infinitive complement
constructions after non-modalised emotion verbs to encode general and specific
predications, the increased tendency to use these constructions to encode the former
type of predication must be seen in the context of the distribution of the other
two constructions introduced in Section 2. Both of these prototypically encode
specific predications in Present-day English: the modalised to-infinitive construction
encodes a specific predication in the projected future (‘I’d like to go now’), the
-ing construction encodes a specific predication in the extended present (‘I like
walking around town’). We begin with like. Figure 2 contains data for the three like
constructions per 00,000 words in two sub-corpora of the Corpus of Late Modern
English Texts ( 7 0–80, 780– 850, see De Smet and Cuyckens 2005), the
Corpus of Early Twentieth Century Texts (containing some three million words
from texts published between 9 and 922, written by authors born in the 880s
and compiled especially for this study) and the Written Imaginative sub-corpus
of the BNC. The reason for compiling the CETCT rather than using CLMET
850– 920 as a source of data for the period between 850 and the time of the
BNC was the hypothesis, later confirmed, that changes were taking place in the