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  1. I am looking for water to drink.

The infinitive "to drink" is obviously an adjectival infinitive that modifies "water".

  1. I am looking for water to quench my thirst.

I feel iffy about this one, as it seems this could be an adverbial phrase that can go to the front of the sentence.

(In order) to quench my thirst, I am looking for water.

  1. I am looking for water to quench my thirst with.

With the addition of an extra preposition, this sounds slightly stilted to my ear. It seems I am no longer able to move the infinitive to sentence beginning.

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  • In Example 2, do you expect to quench your thirst by looking for water? I've never found mere looking to be sufficient; I'd need to actually find the water and drink it. So I think "to quench my thirst" modifies "water", not "looking". Aug 24, 2021 at 1:07

1 Answer 1

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Though they are very similar to adjuncts of purpose, these are probably best analyzed as to-infinitival relative clauses acting as modifiers in a noun phrase headed by water.

These often have modal meaning CaGEL p1068:

Infinitival relatives characteristically have a modal meaning comparable to that expressed in finites by can or should. Here’s something interesting for you to read, for example, is comparable to Here’s something interesting that you can/should read. This modal meaning is indeed what makes relatives ... semantically so close to purpose infinitivals.

Thus,

I am looking for water to drink ___.

is quite similar in meaning to

I am looking for water which I can drink.

and quite different from

I am looking for water to pass the time.

I am looking for water so that I can pass the time.

In your examples there are relativized

  1. I am looking for water to drink ___. [object]

  2. I am looking for water ___ to quench my thirst. [subject]

  3. I am looking for water (for me) to quench my thirst with ____. [object of a preposition]

Comparable relatives for 2 and 3

  1. I am looking for water which can quench my thirst.

  2. I am looking for water which I can quench my thirst with.

That being said, if one did interpret them as adjuncts, the result would be similar.

  1. I am looking for water so that I can drink.

  2. I am looking for water so that I can quench my thirst

  3. I am looking for water so that I can quench my thirst with (that water).

Though these wouldn't necessarily imply that the water would be the thing that you drink in the first, or the thing that quenches your thirst in the second. Of course we'd have to imagine some scenario where you were required to find water in order to drink something or quench your thirst with something other than the water you found.

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  • Thank you for the answer. It is pretty convincing. I probably did a terrible job articulating, but the focus of my question was on #2. Is the adverbial reading possible? I feel uncertain about the bit of ambiguity there, which seems to set it apart from the other two.
    – Eddie Kal
    Aug 23, 2021 at 20:49

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