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

2 8 Thomas Egan
One may perhaps still discern a greater degree of hesitation on the part of the
speaker in the first person expressions in (49) and (5 ) than in (48) and (50). The
modalised variant may perhaps be interpreted as exerting less pressure on the addressee
to respect the wishes of the speaker. On the other hand, what was originally
the more diffident form may be in the process of becoming the unmarked
or default mode of expression, as is the case with ‘if you’d like to’ discussed above,
in which case the connotation of diffidence is likely to be reduced in time. The
example with the second person subject in (52) seems rather more stilted, at least
to my ears, than the one with the modal in (53). (52) is the only one of eleven
tokens of ‘do you prefer to’ in the BNC to encode a forward-looking rather than
a general validity predication (there are fifteen tokens of forward-looking ‘would
you prefer to’). To sum up, prefer seems to be moving in the same direction as like
and love with same-time situations being typically encoded by -ing complements,
situations in the projected future being typically encoded by modalised matrix
verbs followed by to-infinitive complements, and situations of general validity
being encoded by non-modalised matrix verbs and to-infinitive complements.
5. Conclusion
In this paper we have seen that the four verbs like, love, hate and prefer typically
encode general validity predications when the matrix verb is not modalised and
is followed by a to-infinitive clause. The same verbs are typically used to encode
situations in the projected future when the matrix verb is modalised, and sametime
(either one-off or recurrent) situations when the matrix verb is followed by
an -ing clause. As recently as Late Modern English, however, the constructions
with the non-modalised matrix verb and the to-infinitive were used to encode
specific predications, both same-time and forward-looking. The former of these
two usages appears to have been lost. Instead, this sort of predication may now be
encoded in -ing clauses, which, as was shown in Section 3, have been expanding
steadily with these verbs, with the exception of prefer, over the last two hundred
years. The function of encoding forward-looking predications has been increasingly
assumed by the construction with a modalised matrix verb and to-infinitive
clause, a construction that experienced a steady expansion in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. Three of the verbs, like, hate and prefer, may still, nevertheless,
encode specific forward-looking predications when non-modalised and followed
by a to-infinitive. In the case of like this form of predication is limited to negatives
and if-suggestions.
The data investigated in this chapter indicate that there has been a drift towards
a greater degree of form-function isomorphism in this area of non-finite
complementation in English than was the case as recently as 50 years ago. In fact,