Re: [Lingo] Complex sentense

[David J Iannucci <jlinux@example.com>]

> > you've spent US $22000 of your budget to complete work that you
> > originally expected would cost US $24000.
>
> -> "that you (originally) expected *to* cost US $24000" is the correct
> and simpler English?
>
> I never seen "expected would" before...

As Kyle Faber has also said, either "would" or "to" works here (for me,
the meanings are essentially identical and I wouldn't necessarily
prefer either).

To clarify the grammar: your confusion may stem in part from thinking
that the collocation "expect to (verb phrase)" is a "thing" in English.
It is a thing in the sense of being a common idiomatic usage, but it is
not a thing in the sense of "expect to" being a unified....., er...
item. The technical way of saying this is that "expect to" is not a
syntactic constituent. In other words, the syntatic structure looks NOT
like this:

   [... [expect to] [verb-phrase] ...]

but like this:

  [... expect [to verb-phrase] ... ]

In other, other words, the [to verb-phrase] part is an embedded clause,
subordinate to the main clause, where "expect" is the verb. It is
possible to render the subordinate clause differently, as, say

   [(it) would verb-phrase]

where the subject "it" is (here) understood but deleted.  Cf. the
following examples:

* I expect to go
* I expect him to go
* I expect he will go
* I expect he would go
* I expect he could go
* I expect he might go

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012, at 17:18, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> If t  Linguistically speaking, "would" puts the clause about
> expectation into the subjunctive mood.  If you don't know what that
> means, it's English's way of expressing doubt or indeterminism in a
> statement (more or less -- David can probably give a more exact
> definition).

I'm actually not certain whether "would" creates subjunctive mood in a
case like this, but it is certainly "irrealis", of which subjunctive is
one flavor (irrealis means the expression of anything that is not
actualized in the real world).  In the variant using "expect to cost",
the subordinate clause is non-finite, meaning that it has no tense to
place the event in time. I suppose non-finite predicates are by
definition irrealis. Use of "would" here, syntactically speaking, only
reflects the preference of the speaker (in that moment) for a finite
rather than a non-finite expression, whatever the pragmatic[1]
complexities, as Steve has elaborated in detail, may be :-)

HTH. End of linguistic outgeeking :-)

Dave

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics