Motional and aspectual meanings of COME + to_infinitive in native and non-native varieties of English

This paper explores the literal and aspectual usage of COME+infinitive in 6 components of the International Corpus of English: Great-Britain, East-Africa, Hong-Kong, India, Philippine and Singapore. Used literally, COME expresses ‘motion towards the speaker/hearer’ (“We are coming home”), while metaphorically, it signals the ‘reaching of a state’ (“They never came to a conclusion”) or ‘beginning to exist/act’ (“When did the word Renaissance come into use?”). Similarly, when followed by an infinitive, COME can encode goal-oriented motion (“I came to see you only once last year”) or the completion of a process (“I came to see you as a friend”). In the former case, two events are represented, i.e. movement and a goal, the "to" of the infinitive meaning ‘so as to’. In the latter case, a single event is represented, which COME qualifies with the culminative-resultative nuance ‘end up’. The ICE corpus contains about 380 instances of COME+infinitive. Most occur in the IND and HK components, with 170 and 85 instances, respectively, while the other components have about 40-45 occurrences each. In all components, the aspectual meaning is more common (65%; “we came to understand that people’s love cannot be quantified” SIN) than the literal one (30%; “One day, he came to visit” PHIL), although certain occurrences (5%) are compatible with both an agentive (‘decide’) and (externally) causal (‘happen’) interpretation (“people who want to come to this House will come to uphold its powers and its responsibilities” GB). There is a correlation between the semantic nature of the event encoded and the meaning of the construction: deliberate acts performed by agents are associated with literal COME (e.g. “if a customer comes to change the goods” HK), while involuntary processes experienced by sentient participants or undergone by patients are associated with resultative COME (“Later on I came to know what literature was” IND; “it came to be used in schools in Senegal” EA). However, the correlation may be overruled by the larger co-text such as subordinating temporal expressions or embedding structures (“By the time you come to exercise the power of sale there’s nothing to sell right” SIN; “why it was that they came to nominate the company” HK). The construction is mostly realized in non-progressive (simple or perfective) forms (85%), suitable for representing events as whole, undivided units. In conclusion, in all varieties, aspectual COME expresses the culmination of a process, i.e. its realization-completion as following and dependent on the unfolding of an introductory phase (the preliminary stages of the process or the passing of time). Since it presents the completed development of a process as a projected outcome, it acts as a forward-oriented marker of resultativity, or a prospective perfective aspectualizer (Brinton 1988). It resembles other motion verbs which represent courses of events as paths (McIntyre 2001; “bring to a close”; “bring X to understand Y”) and which convey aspectual meanings (inception: “I got to know him quite well”; culmination: “That goes to show you can never count on your neighbours”; causation: “The scandal led them to resign”). References Brinton L. J. 1988. The development of English aspectual systems. Cambridge: CUP. McIntyre A. 2001. “Argument Blockages Induced by Verb Particles in English and German: Event Modification and Secondary Predication.” In Structural Aspects of Semantically Complex Verbs, N. Dehé, A. Wannen (eds.). Berlin/Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang, 131-64.