ToVDSR To-clause after desire verb
Definition
To-clause preceded by a verb of desire.
Detection Rules
mfte
Desire verb + to + verb base form. MFTE has three variants (lines 1404-1406): (1) verb+to+verb, (2) verb+to+X+verb (intervening token), (3) verb+“na”+verb (wanna contraction). Pattern 2 catches cases like “hesitate to to kill” where preprocessing introduces doubled tokens.
p1
cql[lemma={words} & pos="VB.*"] [pos="TO"] [pos="VB"]
p2
cql[lemma={words} & pos="VB.*"] [pos="TO"] [] [pos="VB.*"]
combine: p1 | p2
Word list (69 items)
agree
agreed
agreeing
agrees
choose
chooses
choosing
chose
chosen
decide
decided
decides
deciding
hate
hated
hates
hating
hesitate
hesitated
hesitates
hesitating
hope
hoped
hopes
hoping
intend
intended
intending
intends
like
liked
likes
liking
love
loved
loves
loving
mean
meaning
means
meant
need
needed
needing
needs
plan
planned
planning
plans
prefer
preferred
preferring
prefers
prepare
prepared
prepares
preparing
refuse
refused
refuses
refusing
want
wanted
wanting
wants
wish
wished
wishes
wishing
Normalization
Per finite_verbs
Examples
want to
hope to
Sources
- biber_2006 — Biber, Douglas (2006) : University Language — A Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers
- mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version