I'm a well-educated, native English speaker in the United States. I have (what I would consider) advanced English grammatical understanding from my deep study of Spanish and French. I understand and can recognize various verbal forms, like the nominal gerund form: "I like walking", the present progressive/present participle: "I am walking", the infinitive with "to": "I like to walk", the past participle: "I have walked", the simple past: "I walked", the present subjunctive: "Let them walk", the past subjunctive ("were") followed by a gerund in present participle form ("walking"): "I wish I were walking", etc. But, I need help to better understand this form: "What I have done is walk."
However, I need confirmation what I am seeing below is correct.
- Is my original sentence below correct?
- Is my verbal usage of the two words in bold a form of the infinitive without the word "to"? Or, is it the imperative (I don't think it's this, but it has the same conjugation), or is it something else? What grammatical concept am I using? If the infinitive without "to", then when should one omit "to" in the infinitive?
On the Ask Ubuntu Stack exchange, I have this answer here.
My original wording was this. It sounds natural, native, and correct to me. Is it? The two verbs in question (I think they are infinitive without the word "to") are in bold:
What I have done to fix this problem (on my Pi3) is modify
/etc/rc.local
to sleep 20 seconds (by callingsleep 20
) and then callmount -a
.
Someone from Greece just changed the wording to this, catching only the first verb and changing it to a gerund:
What I have done to fix this problem (on my Pi3) is modifying
/etc/rc.local
to sleep 20 seconds (by callingsleep 20
) and then callmount -a
.
I think my original form is correct, and the correction sounds to me not only grammatically incorrect, but non-native.
Reading I've done:
- Grammar Monster: Non-finite Verbs. One particularly interesting part (but they seem ignorant of the English subjunctive entirely, since it's a bit archaic, not well-understood by most, and generally not formally-taught):
Not all infinitives are preceded by "to." Infinitives also feature in verb chains after verbs like "could," "may," "should," and "would" (i.e., auxiliary verbs) and verbs like "to make" and "to let."
- If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would
keep
it in port forever. (Saint Thomas Aquinas) - Let them
eat
cake. (Queen of France Marie Antoinette)
- If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would