Timeline for Consecutive infinitives
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 3, 2011 at 22:32 | comment | added | Jason Orendorff | Incidentally—I think I remember reading that there is no easy rule that tells which verbs take an infinitive (plan to clean up), which ones take a present participle (consider cleaning up), which ones take the plain verb (help clean up), and which don’t take a second verb at all (* scheme to clean up). That means that if you’re a native speaker, you’ve just memorized them. | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 22:20 | comment | added | Jason Orendorff | @sequoiamcdowell, The problem with that sentence is that consider to agree is ungrammatical all by itself—*consider* doesn’t take an infinitive. So it really doesn’t have anything to do with chains of infinitives. | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 22:12 | answer | added | David Bowman | timeline score: 1 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 16:02 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/120891560807247872 | ||
| Oct 3, 2011 at 15:00 | vote | accept | Ilana | ||
| Oct 3, 2011 at 15:00 | comment | added | Neil Coffey | I wonder if there's really any special restriction on infinitives? As with, say, nested genitives ("the girl next door's uncle's godfather's mother-in-law"), provided that the sentence is actually grammatical, then it's more a question of when you reach practical limits of how many 'nested items/ideas' can be processed in a given context. But it's not clear to me that infinitives constitute a special case as such. | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 14:34 | answer | added | Barrie England | timeline score: 12 | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 14:24 | comment | added | Stop Slandering Monica Cellio | Seems like once you got into a third level you couldn't use just infinitives: "The witness refuses to consider to agree to testify" < bad. "The witness refuses to consider agreeing to testify." I don't really know the applicable rules tho so I'll leave it to another to answer! | |
| Oct 3, 2011 at 14:14 | history | asked | Ilana | CC BY-SA 3.0 |