The origins of pretend like: A syntactic-semantic puzzle in American English and beyond

Abstract

Like can be a finite complementizer in present-day varieties of English after a few verbs of perception, apparentness, and/or behavior. Normally, like in this function is an innovation that has replaced the earlier variants as if and as though. Pretend like CP appears to be an exception: it is not clear that a precedent exists in the form of pretend as if or pretend as though. To investigate, this study employs the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (Davies 2010–), extracting more than 5,000 examples of pretend with CPs between 1900 and 2019. The results offer tentative support for increase in pretend like in recent decades, despite verification that pretend as if and pretend as though were never well-attested. The puzzle of a like complementizer coming to compete with that and Ø complementizers in the absence of as if and as though – which does not happen across other English verbs – is interpreted as analogy on the basis of semantically overlapping verbs of behavior: behave like CP, act like CP, and make (out) like CP. This case study thus illuminates the conditions under which an incoming variant of a morphosyntactic variable can spread to new lexical or grammatical contexts.