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

2 0 Thomas Egan
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1710–1780 1780–1850 1911–1922 BNC WI
like to
d like to
like-ing
Figure 2. Tokens per 00,000 words of three constructions containing the matrix verb like in
four corpora.
distribution of ‘like to’ around the turn of the century that do not show up clearly
in the data in CLMET.
As can be seen in Figure 2, all three like constructions were infrequent before
the end of the eighteenth century. Although the non-modalised ‘like to’ construction,
at least, was current in the ME period (there is an example in the OED from
350), it was comparatively infrequent in Early Modern English. This rarity is presumably
related to the widespread use of the ‘were like to’ and ‘had like to’ constructions
during this period. At any rate these two constructions went into rapid
decline in the nineteenth century, the same period which witnessed the expansion
of both ‘like to’ complement constructions. Note that while the non-modalised
construction has remained fairly stable in incidence over the last two hundred
years, there is an increase in the modalised construction of over 40% between the
second and third periods. For the sake of convenience I will refer to this period,
not strictly accurately, as the latter half of the nineteenth century. The -ing construction
increases steadily over the whole period studied. 6
Figure 3 contains data on the development of the three love constructions.
There are two points in which the development of love, shown in Figure 3, resembles
that of like and which are relevant to the discussion to come in Section 4. One is
the expansion of the modalised construction in the latter half of the nineteenth
6. One should note that there is a general increase in the use of the lexeme would of approx.
0% from CLMET 780– 850 to CETCT. This increase in itself cannot account for the much
larger increase in the incidence of modalised forms of the matrix verb in the case of the four
verbs that are the subject of this paper.