Pressing -ing into service:I don't want you coming around here any more

"I Don't Want Carmelo Reading This Twice" : Nonfinite Syntactic Alternation Governed by "Want" in Contemporary English

“…In a recent paper, Wherrity and Granath (2006) maintain that (1) and (2) above are two distinct surface structures which portray a semantic difference: whereas the basic meaning of the ing form in (2) is 'process' (with variants such as vividness, immediacy, on-goingness, non-futurity or experienced activity), 14 the to form is associated with futurity and conceptual remoteness (see Gonzálvez García 1999: Section 5.3 for the semantics of the to-infinitive raising 14. Wherrity and Granath (2006) claim that on-goingness and vividness are compatible since they maintain that the main discourse function of the ing construction is to make the narrative more vivid by presenting an event as taking place over time. In this respect, they offer example (i) as an illustration of such a function:…”

“…In a corpus of two million words of British and American English, Andersson (1985) found one single example of [want NP V-ing] (Andersson's 'PrP' construction) in a sentence without negation. On the other hand, Wherrity and Granath (2006) report that the vast majority of the [want NP V-ing] examples occur in negative sentences. 17 In their corpus, which consists of approximately 255 million words from British newspapers dated 1993-2004(The Times 1993, and The Guardian and The Observer 1996-2004, 83.13 percent of the ing examples (700 out of 842 examples) are registered in sentences with negative polarity; 5.46 percent (46 examples) are retrieved from interrogative sentences and 11.4 percent (96 examples) occur in affirmative clauses.…”

“…Such percentages seem to reveal that the variable which plays the most significant role in the distribution of the [want NP V-ing] construction in the press genre from 1993 to 2004 is '± interrogative polarity', which is extremely significant (p = 0.0001); in other words, the frequency of the ing construction in interrogative sentences progressively deviates from the frequencies of the same pattern in affirmative and negative sentences, the differences observed in the latter polarity alternatives not being so significant. Wherrity and Granath (2006), which is focused on the diachronic productivity of the [want NP V-ing] construction, is useful as far as the factor of grammatical polarity is concerned since it provides information about the distribution of the ing complementation variant in affirmative, negative and interrogative sentences. Whereas Wherrity and Granath's data will be discussed in detail in section 3.4, let us now concentrate on the degree of variation illustrated by their 700 examples of negative sentences versus 96 of affirmative sentences out of 842 examples.…”

“…In their study on want complementation after 1993, Wherrity and Granath (2006 : Table 1) registered 842 examples of the ing construction in their corpus of approximately 255 million words, that is, with a normalised frequency of 3.3 examples per million words. Apart from the raw percentage itself, which unfortunately is not contrasted with the frequency of the [want NP to-V] alternative, Wherrity and Granath's paper is certainly illuminating because it attests the apparent progressive increase of the ing construction from 1993 onwards.…”

“…Apart from the raw percentage itself, which unfortunately is not contrasted with the frequency of the [want NP to-V] alternative, Wherrity and Granath's paper is certainly illuminating because it attests the apparent progressive increase of the ing construction from 1993 onwards. 21 In Figure 2 I offer Wherrity and Granath's (2006) results on the basis of normalised frequencies per 1 million words -the figures used by Wherrity and Granath are not normalised and, in consequence, their findings may be slightly distorted. The chi-square test does not however support the visual output in Figure 2 and reveals that the diachronic difference is not statistically significant (p = 0.7176).…”