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Pragmatic Strengthening and the Meaning of Complement Constructions

The Case of Like and Love with the to-Infinitive

Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

Hubert Cuyckens

Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

The meaning of complement constructions is generally thought of as determined by the interaction of the semantics of the complement clause with the meaning of the complement-taking verb. In the case of ‘ like/love + to-infinitive’, however, the meaning of the complement construction has been affected by a process of pragmatic strengthening and subjectification. As a result, ‘ like/love + to-infinitive’has developed aspectual and epistemic uses that can no longer be explained from the semantic interaction of the pattern’s component parts but that arise as speaker-based conversational implicatures in particular discourse contexts. Using corpus data, the authors show that this account is in accordance with a number of peculiarities in the present-day use of the constructions and with attested historical fact. More generally, the development of the constructions ‘ like/love + to-infinitive’ can be seen as an instance of incipient grammaticalization with reflexes in the semantic, phonological, and morphosyntactic characteristics of the constructions.

Key Words: complementation • grammaticalization • semantics • subjectification • habitual aspect • infinitive

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