I thought I heard you call my name

Question

I read several sentences, like these:

1. "I thought I heard you call my name", should this be "I thought I heard you called my name"?
2. "Yesterday I saw a lion kiss a deer", should this be "Yesterday I saw a lion kissed a deer"?

Answer 1

No, the originals are correct. If the originals included the word "that" (I saw that a lion kissed a deer) that would also be correct.

Answer 2

You have run into a construct called the bare infinitive. As you'll recall the infinitive form of a verb is the word to plus the plain form of the verb. (This is also the form used by the first person present tense.) Infinitives are nonfinite verbs, (i.e., they don't form the main predicates of senteneces, and they are not inflected for tense). Infinitives instead find places in sentences also occupied by others constructs, often noun phrases. Let's take an example:

I wanted to kiss my wife.

The infinitive to kiss here is the direct object of wanted. Notice that (1) this is the kind of position that might be occupied by a noun phrase:

I wanted a kiss from my wife.

and (1) even though the main verb wanted is in the past tense, the infinitive doesn't reflect a tense. There's so such grammatical thing as to kissed. In the present tense, the infinitive won't change:

I want to kiss my wife.

In some cases, it is idiomatic to drop the infinitive's companion to, making it a bare infinitive:

I thought I heard you [to] call my name.

Here the [to] just means that call is part of an infinitive. The to is unexpressed and it would be ungrammatical to express it. The opposite is true in other cases. For instance

I thought I told you to call my name.