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

Emotion verbs with to-infinitive complements 2 7
were (44) and (45). 8 The other 2 contained to-infinitive complements, as in
(46) and (47). 9
(44) Corral generally prefers buying from commercial galleries rather than auction
houses and she often consults the artists about the works the Museum intends
to buy. (BNC EBS 707)
(45) Macho man usually prefers talking to his own sex because it’s
safer, and he’s more interested in proving he’s as ‘male’ as his
peer group than in entering a relationship which requires an
ability to give, to love, to be tender. (BNC H83 939)
(46) They had noticed that females of both types generally prefer to
mate with a quadrimaculata male, if given a choice. (BNC GU8 76)
(47) The children could take early dinner, but they usually
preferred to eat with us in one of the dining rooms. (BNC AMW 457)
Thus prefer has come to resemble the other three verbs with respect to the encoding
of general validity predications by means of the to-infinitive form. This form
may also be employed on occasion to encode specific predications in the projected
future. When so used, it often seems difficult to find any tangible difference in
meaning between utterances with a modalised and non-modalised matrix verb.
(48)–(53) may serve to illustrate this point.
(48) ‘I shall be at Trebyan for a while.’ ‘I’ll drop you off there, sir.’
‘No, I prefer to walk.’ (BNC GWB 2955)
(49) ‘Do you want to go and sit down some place?’ Maggie asked.
‘No, I’d prefer to keep walking.’ (BNC AN7 2262)
(50) ‘But I prefer to see you safely to your flat. (BNC JXS 3848)
(5 ) ‘Yes, but I’d prefer to come with you. (BNC GUS 309)
(52) ‘So, are you going to climb on board or do you prefer to stay
here in the water? (BNC JXT 643)
(53) ‘We’re fully booked for this evening, sir. Oh, just a moment . . .
I do have one seat left in the stalls. Or would you prefer to try
your luck up in the Gallery?’ (BNC KAT 3)
8. It may be of interest to note in this connection that there are no instances of these three adverbs
directly preceding ‘enjoy -ing’ or ‘dislike -ing’ in the BNC, which is in line with what one would expect
if these constructions prototypically encode either one-off or recurrent actuated situations.
9. However, one should enter the proviso here that ‘prefer to’ is almost ten times more common
than ‘prefer -ing’.