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

Emotion verbs with to-infinitive complements 2 5
Present-day English by means of ‘would like to’. As mentioned in Section 2, the
only contexts in which such forward-looking predications with non-modalised
like as those in (3 )–(34) survive in Present-day English are in if-suggestions and
negatives. In the case of the former, the modalised construction is in the process
of superseding the non-modalised one. Figure 7 gives details of the development
over two hundred years of all if-clauses containing modalised ‘like to’ and
non-modalised ‘like to’.
Figure 7 shows the steady retreat of ‘if x like to’ in the face of the spread of ‘if x
would like to’. Today we only find specific if-clauses with non-modalised like used
to encode suggestions, and even when so used, they are in direct competition with
the modalised variety, as may be seen in (35)–(40).
(35) So if you like to write that one down. (BNC FMH 679)
(36) Right so if you’d like to label that triangle. (BNC FMJ 85)
(37) If you like to look back at the cathedral office in an hour, I’ll
see it’s ready for you. (BNC HA2 2 8 )
(38) If you’d like to come back to my office we can discuss it there,’
he said, looking at Fairham. (BNC G0 966)
(39) If you like to get on I’ll fetch my horse. (BNC A0R 2245)
(40) If you’d like to go into the next room, please. (BNC F77 523)
It is difficult to discern any substantive semantic or pragmatic differences between
the pairs of tokens with modalised and non-modalised matrix verbs
in (35)–(40). The development of these two forms over the last two hundred
years appears to be an example of drift in the classic sense of Sapir ( 92 ), with
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1780–1850 1911–1922 BNC
if – modal like
if + modal like
Figure 7. The percentage of ‘if x like to’ versus ‘if x would like to’ in three corpora.