Hubert Cuyckens

Pragmatic strengthening and the meaning of complement constructions: the case of like and love with the to-infinitive

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.