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negative force
Does the second example give an impression of greater negative force?
I tend not to go to London if I want quality restaurants. I tend to not go to London if I want quality restaurants.
I don't think they have different amounts of negative force, but the first one sounds more natural to me.
Heh - I am exactly the opposite, in that "I tend to not go to London if I want quality restaurants" to be far more natural than "I tend not to go to London if I want quality restaurants." Part of it is that I perceive the "to" to be bound to "tend" (to the point that it "feels" like an affix to me), and thus to separate the two seems almost archaic to me. At the same time, "to" is only very loosely bound to a following infinitive to me, to the point that it is very normal to place adverbial forms such as "not" between it and the following infinitive. Even in other contexts, placing "not" before "to" rather than after it seems rather formal and quite conservative to me overall, to the point that I would not use such in normal everyday speech.
Similarly, I perceive forms like "have to", "need to", "tend to", "be going to", "be supposed to", "want to", "use to", and so on to act as fixed verbal forms, which only change with respect to your standard English verb forms, infinitive/present, preterite, past participle, present participle, and gerund (I separate the last two due to inconsistencies with respect to them in English dialects). I emphatically do not perceive them as being "have", "need", "tend", "be going", "be supposed", "want", and "use" followed by an independent "to". They may be written out as separate words in English orthography, take multiple primary stresses, and have separate cliticization or elision of an initial "be", but they act *syntactically* as if they were single words here (even if morphologically they act nothing like normal English verbs as wholes).
Damn, now that I think about this, this is actually a very significant syntactic difference between North American English dialects; the fact that your dialect places "not" before the "to" indicates that "to" is still treated as part of a "full" infinitive, whereas my very strong preference for placing "to" immediately after "tend" in all cases implies that forms like "tend to" have become truly lexicalized here, and that they really take "bare" infinitives, like classical English modal and auxiliary verbs.
This indicates that your dialect is fundamentally at a different stage with respect to reanalysis of English verbs, as you still treat forms like these as normal English verbs, while the dialect here has already reanalyzed forms like "tend to" and "have to" as single units which belong to their own grammaticalized subclass of verbs (as they clearly do not inflect like normal English verbs and yet all act very similar to each other). Going further, one could potentially guess that such forms here are likely more modal-like than those in your dialect due to their grammaticalization. Such would not be surprising, though, considering that such forms have already displaced may nof the classical English modal forms, such as "must" and "shall", and have already encroached on other classical modal forms, such as "can", "will", "should", and "may".
I think in my case, it's that I very rarely use "have to", "need to", "be going to", "be supposed to", "want to", or "use to" with a following negation, and "tend not to" has become a sort of entrenched form. (With those other forms, if/when I do use a following negation, I definitely prefer "to not" over "not to", like you.)
Okay, so this is probably just an idiolectal or dialect quirk, rather than any real fundamental syntactic difference here. That basically renders my previous post mood - heh.
Yeah, it seems that in my dialect, "tend to" hasn't been lexicalized to the extent of those other verbs.
Where are you from, for the record? (I'm just wondering for the sake of figuring out the distribution of "tend to not" versus "tend not to".)
>>I think in my case, it's that I very rarely use "have to", "need to", "be going to", "be supposed to", "want to", or "use to" with a following negation, and "tend not to" has become a sort of entrenched form. (With those other forms, if/when I do use a following negation, I definitely prefer "to not" over "not to", like you.)<<
It is still interesting that you rarely use these with following negation. At least here, such is extremely common, moreso than preceding negation, and furthermore is semantically very distinct from preceding negation. The matter is that following negation (with "not") always negates the main verb and *never* the quasimodal form while preceding negation (with "don't") always negates the quasimodal form and never the main verb. Furthermore, forms with following negation are normally stronger than forms with preceding negation here. For instance, "I tend to not go to London if I want quality restaurants" means that one specifically disfavors going to London for going to quality restaurants, while "I don't tend to go to London if I want quality restaurants" merely means that one generally does not specifically favor London for going to quality restaurants. The two are not interchangeable, but at the same time, the stronger forms with "tend to not" are normally preferred over the weaker forms with "don't tend to" here, which just feel less "clear" as to what they mean, at least to me. Similarly, one gets an even more distinctive difference in cases like "I have to not put beer in the fishtank" versus "I don't have to put beer in the fishtank", where the former is a direct statement that one must not put beer in the fishtank, whereas the latter is just saying that one is not required to put beer in the fishtank. In cases like this, treating the two forms as interchangeable simply does not occur here, due to the very large semantic difference between the two.
<<"I tend [to not go/not to go] to London if I want quality restaurants"
"I don't tend to go to London if I want quality restaurants">> <<"I have to not put beer in the fishtank" "I don't have to put beer in the fishtank">> Yeah, those same differences in meaning exist here - "don't have to [verb]" and "have to not [verb]" definitely mean different things to me. It just seems that I don't have as much call to use the latter forms. I think "tend to" is the most likely of the verbs in question to use following negation in my speech.
Let me rephrase. What I meant to say is, with the verbs other than "tend", the forms with preceding "don't", rather than a following "not" (which of course doesn't mean the same thing), seem to come up more commonly in my speech, but in the case of "tend", it seems to be the following "not" that's more common for me.
<<Heh - I am exactly the opposite, in that "I tend to not go to London if I want quality restaurants" to be far more natural than "I tend not to go to London if I want quality restaurants." Part of it is that I perceive the "to" to be bound to "tend" (to the point that it "feels" like an affix to me), and thus to separate the two seems almost archaic to me. >>
But isn't the negative split-infinitive relatively new in American English? |