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The neat new Oxford Modern English Grammar by Bas Aarts (£20) includes like in a little list of verbs, mostly of wanting and hating, that can take as a direct object a clause using the infinitive: ‘I like them to do it.’ Some such verbs introduce the clause with for: ‘I yearn for them to do it.’ Some that Dr Aarts lists with for do not sound admissible to me: ‘I prefer for them to do it.’
I mention all this by way of introducing an extraordinary construction that I have heard twice in a week. ‘I like that they are doing it,’ said a woman on Radio Four. Like taking as an object a clause introduced by that is a construction that I would have thought impossible.
The way I’d express it is: ‘I like them doing it.’ If I was feeling grammatical, I’d make it: ‘I like their doing it,’ since the object of like is the verbal-noun or gerund doing, and thus the pronoun is possessive, their. However, we tend in our frailty to make the object a sort of compound, ‘them doing it’. The construction of like, with a verbal noun as object was only noticed by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1997, though it found examples going back to 1824: ‘How do you like being boxed up with the old lady?’
As for Mrs Pepys, there is no further mention of a parrot coming from Mr Steventon at Portsmouth.
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