Saturday, November 14, 2015

difference - Which is the appropriate word here : 'wish' or 'want'?


I read the two sentences below and I am confused as to which one is more appropriate.






  1. I wish you to be mine.




  2. I want you to be mine.





The word wish refers to desire and the word want refers to need. Now I do not understand if both are proper or not. Any suggestions?



Answer




I agree with all of the answers that have been posted so far; but I think an important factor has been overlooked.


The expression I wish [PERSON] to [VERB] &c is for all practical purposes dead in Present-Day English.


COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, "contains more than 450 million words of text and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. It includes 20 million words each year from 1990-2012." Over that period it records only 24 uses of I wish you to. Of these, 1 is a quotation from Cardinal Newman (1801-1890); 1 is from an interview with an Afghan diplomat; the remaining 22 are from works of fiction, all of which are either historical novels or quasi-historical fantasies.


In contrast, COCA finds 118 instances of I wish you would and 221 instances of I wish you were, both collections including many spoken, journalistic and academic uses. And it finds more than five thousand instances of I want you to.


The results from BNC, the British National Corpus, are similar.


As user3169 says, wish implies "something that may not be likely to occur, or something that is not likely to be within one's control". Consequently, it is no longer used with indicative clauses, only with 'subjunctives': counterfactual and hypothetical propositions.


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