This paper discusses the origins and history of a grammatical construction consisting of a form of the copula followed by an infinitival verb form. Although it became obsolete in Standard English in the 19th century, the construction still survives in some regional varieties of British and American English, e.g. she liketa had a heart attack. Using a corpus of texts covering the last five centuries, I will document the rise of the construction via invited inferences of counterfactuality drawn in the specific discourse context of predictive conditional constructions, and consider some possible reasons for its subsequent near demise.