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

2,50
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1,50
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1710–1780 1780–1850 1911–1922 BNC WI
Emotion verbs with to-infinitive complements 2 1
love to
d love to
love-ing
Figure 3. Tokens per 00,000 words of three constructions containing the matrix verb love in
four corpora.
century, the other the slight expansion of the -ing construction in the twentieth.
While the non-modalised to-infinitive construction with like remains fairly stable
in incidence throughout the twentieth century, in the case of love it suffers a sharp
decline.
Corresponding data for the three hate constructions are contained in Figure 4.
The development of hate is parallel to that of both like and love in the two areas
most pertinent to the argument in this chapter: the ‘would hate to’ construction
increases in the latter half of the nineteenth century as does the -ing construction
which continues to increase in the twentieth. There is a decrease in the incidence
of the modalised construction in the twentieth century.
Data for the prefer constructions are given in Figure 5. The data for prefer
differ from the other three constructions in respect of one of the two factors of
most relevance to the topic of this chapter. While there is a growth in the incidence
of the modalised construction in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
there is actually a slight decrease in the incidence of the -ing construction over
the last 00 years. This development, however, must be seen against the background
of the fact that the -ing form was the first non-finite complementiser to
be used with this matrix verb. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth
century that the other two constructions became more commonplace.
Let us summarise the contents of Figures 2–5. In the case of all four matrix
verbs, the construction that prototypically encodes specific events in the projected
future in Present-day English, the modalised matrix verb + to-infinitive construction
became more widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century. In
the case of three of them the construction that prototypically encodes same-time
specific events, the -ing construction, became more widespread in the twentieth
century. In the next section we will see that there was a statistically significant