GUIDEPOSTS FOR CHOOSING BETWEEN THE FULL INFINITIVE, BARE OR ZERO INFINITIVE, AND GERUND IN CONSTRUCTING SENTENCES

Part I - When to use full infinitives, bare infinitives, or gerunds

An Iran-based English teacher asked me by e-mail sometime in 2019 how to answer this multiple-choice test question: “Peter, you have been working so hard this year. I am sure you must be tired. My suggestion for you is (take, to take, taking) some time off.”

                                                IMAGE CREDIT: CALLANSCHOOL.INFO

The three answer choices she provided are the bare or zero infinitive “take,” the full infinitive “to take,” and the gerund “taking.” I thus replied to Ms. Farhad H. that with a fair knowledge of these grammar forms and based on how the third sentence sounds, the correct answer is the full infinitive “to take”: “My suggestion for you is to take some time off.”

The much tougher question though is why the answer should be “to take” and not “take” or “taking.” To answer it correctly, we need to review the infinitives and gerunds as verbals, which are words that combine the characteristics of a verb and a noun.

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Recall that a full infinitive has the form “to + base form of the verb,” as in the full infinitive “to rest” in the sentence “The tired watchman decided to rest,”; where “to rest” is the direct object (the receiver of the action) of the operative verb “decided.”

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On the other hand, a bare or zero infinitive is an infinitive that, to work properly (or at the very least smoothly), needs to drop the function word “to” and use only the verb’s base form, as in “rest” in “We saw the watchman rest for a while.” In this sentence, the bare infinitive “rest” is the direct object of the verb “saw.” (Using the full infinitive “to rest” here sounds awkward and iffy, “We saw the watchman to rest for a while ” so it's obviously couldn't be a corect answer).

As to a gerund, recall that it’s a form of the verb that ends in “-ing” to become a noun, as in the gerund “resting” in “Resting recharged the watchman for the rest of his shift.” In that sentence, the gerund “resting” is the subject, a role that its full infinitive equivalent—although also a noun form—plays very awkwardly in this particular instance: “To rest recharged the watchman for the rest of his shift.”

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This grammar complication in choosing the correct verbal brings us to the four general ground rules for using an infinitive or gerund in particular sentence constructions:

1. Use the infinitive as subject to denote potential, as in “To forgive is a good thing.” On the other hand, use the gerund to denote actuality or fact, as in “Forgiving made her feel better.”

2. Use the full infinitive as a complement or object to denote future ideas and plans, as in “His life-goal is to teach.” On the other hand, use the gerund when denoting acts done or ended, as in “She chose teaching.”

3. Use the full infinitive as a complement for single action, as in “He took a leave to travel,” and likewise for repeated action, as in “Evenings we come here to rest.” On the other hand, use the gerund for ongoing action, as in “The fashion model finds resting necessary after every shoot.”

4. Use the full infinitive as object for a request, as in “He asked me to wait,” for instruction, as in “She instructed me to rehearse,” and causation, as in “He was forced to resign.” On the other hand, use the gerund for attitude, as in “She thinks teaching is a noble profession,” and for unplanned action, as in “She found jogging to her liking.”

On top of these ground rules, we must firmly keep in mind that the primary basis for choosing an infinitive or gerund is the specific operative verb of the sentence. We also need to recognize that some operative verbs can take full or bare infinitives, others can take gerunds, and the rest can take both. 

In Part II, we’ll focus on the choice between full infinitives and bare infinitives. (June 27, 2019)

Part II - When to use full infinitives, bare infinitives, or gerunds

In Part I, to answer a question from an Iran-based English teacher, I started laying out the basis for why the full infinitive “to take” is the correct answer in this multiple-choice statement: “Peter, you have been working so hard this year. I am sure you must be tired. My suggestion for you is (take, to take, taking) some time off.”

After a quick review of full infinitives, bare (zero) infinitives, and gerunds—they are the so-called verbals, or words that combine the characteristics of verb and noun—I presented four general rules for choosing between infinitives and gerunds for particular sentence constructions. This time I’ll focus on the choice between full infinitives and bare infinitives when used as subject, object, or complement of a sentence.

There are really no hard-and-fast rules for choosing the full infinitive or the bare infinitive. While the primary determinant for the choice is the operative verb and syntax of the sentence, we’ll only find out which of the two infinitive forms works—or at least works better—by first using the full infinitive as default. When it doesn’t work, simply use the bare infinitive.

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CHOOSING BETWEEN THE FULL INFINITIVE AND THE BARE OR ZERO INFINITIVE

The full infinitive is, of course, the only choice when it’s the subject of the sentence, as in “To give up isn’t an option at this time.” The bare infinitive form won’t work as it reduces the full infinitive to a verb phrase: “Give up isn’t an option at this time.” (Take note tthough that the gerund form, “giving up,” works just fine for that sentence: “Giving up iisn’t an option at this time.”)

Now let’s look at particular grammatical and syntax situations when using the bare infinitive becomes a must:

1. Use a bare infinitive or bare infinitive phrase when it’s preceded by the adverbs “rather,” “better,” and “had better” or by the prepositions “except,” “but,” “save” (in the sense of “except”), and “than.” 

Examples: “She would rather stay single than marry that obnoxious suitor.” “With her deceitful ways, you had better reject her overtures to team up with you.” “They did everything except beg.” 

The two sentences become faulty-sounding when the full infinitive is used: “She would rather to stay single than to marry that obnoxious suitor.” “With her deceitful ways, you had better to reject her overtures to team up with you.” “They did everything except to beg.”)

2. The verb auxiliaries “shall,” “should,” “will,” “would,” “may,” “might,” “can,” “could,” and “must” should always be followed by a bare infinitive: “I shall fire those scalawags.” “We might visit next week.” “You must investigate right away.” (Faulty with the full infinitive: “I shall to fire those scalawags.” “We might to visit next week.” “You must to investigate right away.”)

3. The object complement should be a bare infinitive when the operative verb followed by an object is a perception verb such as “see,” “feel,” “hear,” or “watch”: “She watched him do the job and saw him do it well.” “We heard him castigate an erring general.” (Faulty with the full infinitive: “She watched him to do the job and saw him to do it well.” “We heard him to castigate an erring general.”)

4. The object complement should be a bare infinitive when the operative verb is the helping verb “make” or “let”: “She always makes me feel loved.” (Faulty with the full infinitive: “She always makes me to feel loved.”) However, the helping verb “help” itself can take either a full infinitive or a bare infinitive as object complement. Formal-sounding with the full infinitive: “She helped them to mount the rebellion.” Relaxed, informal-sounding with the bare infinitive: “She helped them mount the rebellion.”

Again, as a rule, use the full infinitive as default to see if the sentence will work properly and sound right. Otherwise, use the bare infinitive.

This two-part essay appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the June 27, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

A TIMELY READING FOR THIS HOLIDAY SEASON

The need to equate things solely on comparable attributes

For this year’s Christmas Season, I couldn’t think of a better, more instructive, more wide-ranging, and more intellectually stimulating article for Jose Carillo’s Blogspot on the English language than “The need to equate things solely on comparable attributes,” an essay that I wrote for my Manila Times column way back on March 2, 2004. I trust that you’ll find the subject as enlightening and as fascinating as when I was researching and composing it 19 years and almost 9 months ago.

I wish you and your loved ones a Truly Joyous Christmas and a Prosperous and Safe New Year in 2024 and in the years beyond!

In the business of language, the easiest thing to do is to either affirm the uniqueness of things or to highlight their differences. “Yes, he’s a magnificent brawler in the ring” or “True, he’s hopelessly incompetent as a public speaker” are such quick affirmations, and so are “Oh, my God, she’s beautiful!” and this timeworn metaphor on beauty, “It was the face that launched a thousand ships.” The logic in contrasting things is likewise easy to grasp. For instance, the extreme comparatives in “The villain was uglier than the Devil himself” or “The aureole of the nuclear blast was brighter than a thousand suns” are immediately understandable because both of their referents—“the Devil” and our “sun”—are all-too-familiar symbols in our psyche.

Is the equation of comparable things in the statement above based 

solely on comparable attributes?*

When it comes to declaring the equality of things, however, we stand on shakier ground. There simply are no hard-and-fast rules to stating perfect equivalence, particularly among intrinsically different things. For instance, even if we believed it to be true based on personal taste and experience, to say “The mango is as delicious as the apple” or “Summers in Cebu are as restful as those in New Orleans” is bound to make our readers or listeners scratch their heads in wonder. As the linguists will say, the semantic polarities of the two statements are suspect, perhaps altogether anomalous. This is because equating different things, as opposed to directly measuring, say, length with a meter stick or popularity with a Pulse Asia or Social Weather Stations survey, needs more discernment, a greater capacity for rational judgment, and a deeper knowledge of what the audience—our readers or listeners—know about things in general and about us.

We are therefore well-advised to avoid the lure of what the linguists call cross-polar anomalies in prose, whether ours or those of others, and no matter how deceptively elegant and tempting they may look, sound, and feel. Cross-polar anomalies are those semantic constructions that seem logical on first blush, but often border on the meaningless and absurd, like these sentences: “An economist is safer for the presidency than a corporate lawyer is dangerous.” “A former military officer is abler for public governance than an actor is unfit.” “Our patience for religious charlatans is longer than our tolerance for incompetent public officials is short.” Somewhere in the deep recesses of such failed comparisons, or faulty equatives as the linguists call them, the truth that we thought we saw has been hopelessly lost in construction.

The general rule in equatives is that comparisons formed out of the so-called “positive” and “negative” pairs of adjectives are semantically anomalous. In the cross-polar constructions given in the preceding paragraph, for instance, these pairs of adjectives or noun phrases betray that anomaly: “safer”/“dangerous,” “abler”/“unfit,” and “longer patience”/“short tolerance.” All three are as absurd as the proverbial wrong equatives about the taste, texture, and nutritive value of apples and pears.

How do we avoid such conundrums, which is the term linguists use for such intricate and difficult semantic problems that, from the layman’s standpoint, actually amount to vexing riddles? For practical purposes—and never mind what the metaphysicians and the political and religious spinmasters say—we should only go for equatives that respect the norms of logic and reason. This means that we should only equate comparable things, with the equation based solely on comparable attributes. The more useful equatives from our standpoint as laymen, in fact, are those that equate the absolute projections of two subjects on the same scale.

Here’s one sentence that meets that criterion: “The depth of the ravine into which the wayward bus fell is as great as the height of a three-story building.” Here, the two subjects being equated are “the depth of the ravine” and “the height of a three-story building,” and the common scale they are being measured against is length; the equation can be easily understood and accepted based on common sense and, for the cynic, verified by actual measurement with a meter stick. The same thing can be said of this other sentence, which focuses this time on area as a common scale: “The land area of Egypt is practically as big as that of Bolivia, but the productivity of their soil is markedly different.” (To the cynics, Egypt has 1,001,450 sq. km. to Bolivia’s 1,098,581.)

Once this concept of scalarity becomes second nature to us, we can be more ambitious in our equatives without fear of bungling them, as in this sentence: “The meteor formed a huge and deep hole upon impact, a perfectly circular crevice as big as the small town of San Juan in Manila and as deep as the height of the Sears Tower in New York.” That horrifying statement is fictitious, of course, but there can be no doubt about the authenticity and scalarity of its equatives. 

This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the March 2, 2004 issue of The Manila Times, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
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*Although this illustration and its accompanying comparative statement are widely used in various references on the web, their original source has not been identified and found.

STRATEGIES FOR WRITING AND SPEAKING BETTER ENGLISH

To write and speak better English, avoid over-repeating the
same key words or their equivalent officious stock phrases

A Tanzania-based member of Jose Carillo's English Forum thanked me sometime in 2013 for writing on the need to avoid officious stock phrases when writing or speaking. He said: “I agree that the best way to effectively get our ideas across is by making our sentences as precise as possible. But as a beginning writer, I sometimes feel reluctant to use one word more than two times in the same writing. That’s why I’m sometimes tempted to alternate, say, ‘about’ with such unpleasant bureaucratic phrases like ‘with regard to,’ ‘with reference to,’ and ‘as regards.' Admittedly, they sound standoffish and tend to get in the way of clear communication, but I think they help in many ways eradicate repetition in the prose. Is there any better tactic of getting rid of repetition?” 

In my reply, I wrote Mwita Chacha that the repeated use of a particular word in writing is not bad per se; it’s the dysfunctional overuse of that word that has to be studiously avoided. And I wouldn’t use the word “tactic” to describe such studious avoidance, because a tactic seems too fleeting and too short-term an approach for dealing with unpleasant over-repetition. Instead, I would go for the word “strategy” to describe the more methodical and wide-ranging way for achieving that objective. 

To come up with such a viable strategy in English, we need to distinguish between its two general types of words and to understand the matter of language register and tonality.

The two general types of words in English

The two general types of words in English, you will recall, are the content words and the function words. The content words are the carriers of meaning of the language, and they consist of the nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections. The function words are the logical operators of the language, and they consist of the prepositions, conjunctions (the coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions), and conjunctive adverbs. In a class of their own are the articles “a,” “an,” and “the,” which many grammarians consider as neither content words nor function words (we won’t take up the articles here to keep this discussion manageable).

Among the content words, nouns are the most amenable to substitution with other words as a strategy for avoiding tedious repetition. For this purpose, of course, we routinely use pronouns for subsequent mentions of subjects identified by name—“he” or “she” for singular proper names and “they” for one or more of them, and “it” for singular things and concepts and also “they” for one or more of them. In feature writing and in the more creative forms of expression, we can use synonyms or similar words for subsequent mentions of particular nouns. Those synonyms can focus on particular or specific attributes of the subject or key word, thus giving the reader or listener more information about them without going into digressions that might just unnecessarily impede the flow of the exposition. 

For example, the subject or key word “John Updike” might be later referred to in an exposition generically as “the writer” or more specifically as “a writer of sex-suffused fiction,” “a notable literary realist,” “the prolific American novelist and short-story writer,” “the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist,” and “America’s last true man of letters.” Indeed, by using a synonym or brief descriptive detail, each subsequent mention of the subject becomes an opportunity for throwing new light on it for the reader’s or listener’s benefit.

IMAGE CREDIT: WOODWARDENGLISH

As parts of speech in English, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs each have a unique and distinctive meaning or sense. In the case of verbs, there’s a specific verb for every kind of action; for instance, while there are close similarities between “walk,” “stroll,” “saunter,” “amble,” and “jog,” they are not by any means perfectly synonymous. Thus, once you have used the verb “walk” the first time around for the action you are describing, it won’t be appropriate or advisable—just for the sake of avoiding repetition—to refer to that action as “stroll” the second time around, “saunter” the third time around, “amble” the fourth time around, and so on and so forth. For accuracy and authenticity’s sake, you’ve got to stick to “walk” in all subsequent mentions of that action you described as “walk” at the start.

This strategy should also be applicable to adjectives and adverbs. For instance, you’d be out of line describing a woman as “beautiful” the first time around, then describing her as “pretty,” “comely,” or “fair” in subsequent mentions; you’ve got to stick to “beautiful” or else not use that adjective again in the exposition. The same strategy would also apply to adverbs; once you have described the manner an action is done as “cruelly,” you can’t refer to that same manner as “fiercely” in a subsequent mention. In fact, it would be good language policy to avoid repeat usage of adverbs (particularly those than end in “-ly”) or use their synonyms later in an exposition.

Now let’s take up what you describe as your reluctance to use one word more than two times in the same writing and, in particular, your being tempted to sometimes alternate the preposition “about” with such unpleasant bureaucratic phrases as “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards.” Of course it’s a good general approach to avoid using the same word or phrase more than two times in the same exposition, but strategically, I think you’d be ill-advised to alternate “about” with such phrases as “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards” in subsequent parts of the same exposition. As you yourself have pointed out, although these phrases can eradicate repetition in your prose, they will definitely make your prose sound standoffish and thus just get in the way of clear communication. It will be like jumping from the frying pan to the fire, so to speak.

Along with the preposition “about,” its synonymous phrases “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards” belong to the class of words known as the function words. As I mentioned at the outset, function words are the logical operators of the language, and as such they have very specific purposes and roles to play in the creation of meaning in language. In the particular case of prepositions, there’s a unique word for combining a word or phrase with another noun phrase to express a particular modification or predication; as a rule, for instance, “on,” “in,” “at,” “to,” “toward,” and “after” can’t be substituted with or interchanged with one another. Most preposition usage is essentially conventional rather than logical, but it’s a fact that specific prepositions have become so well-established for evoking particular relationships in space, time, and logic that it would be foolhardy to misuse them, to trifle with them, or to tinker with them. The good writer knows that a healthy respect for the conventional usage of prepositions greatly paves the way for good communication.

Now, the preposition “about” belongs to what I would call the normal, day-to-day language register of English. A language register is, of course, simply a variety of a language that’s used in a particular social, occupational, or professional context. In general, in terms of degree of formality, we can classify the language of register of English in six categories: very formal, which is characterized by very rigid, bureaucratic language; formal, characterized by ceremonious, carefully precise language; neutral, characterized by objective, indifferent, uncaring language; informal, characterized by casual or familiar language; very informal, characterized by very casual and familiar language; and intimate, characterized by personal and private language. (Note here that I didn’t hesitate to used the verb “characterized” five times, for to have alternately used the verb phrase “distinguished by” would have been a needless distraction.)

It so happens though that over the centuries, the legal profession developed a variety of English that’s pejoratively called legalese, an officious, legal-sounding language that can be roughly classified between very formal and formal language. This is the language used by lawyers in making contracts, affidavits, depositions, and pleadings before a court of law. A common feature of legalese is the substitution of the day-to-day, vanilla-type preposition “about” with the longish and ponderous phrases “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards” along with the substitution of such day-to-day, vanilla-type conjunctions “because,” “so,” and “later” with their longish equivalents “whereas,” “therefore,” and “hereinafter,” respectively. When legalese stays within the confines of the legal profession or community, however, all’s well with English as we know it.

It's unfortunate, though, that legalese has continually leached into both written and spoken business English over the years, such that a typical memo or business report these days sounds very much like a legal brief meant for lawyers and court magistrates. When peppered with such legalese as “attached herewith,” “aforesaid,” “heretofore,” and “for your perusal,” the English of such memos and business reports becomes very rigid and bureaucratic and extremely formal or harsh in tone. This is the language register and tonality that your English would acquire if, for the purpose of avoiding repetition of the preposition “about,” you fall into the habit of routinely alternating it with such legalese as “with regard to,” “with reference to,” and “as regards.” What’s even worse, your use of these forms of legalese will force you to make unwieldy, complicated sentence constructions to match their ponderousness and severity.    

My advice to you then is to fiercely resist the temptation to alternate common prepositions and the function words in general with their legalistic counterparts. You’ll be much better off as a writer and as a communicator by using the plain-and-simple English prepositions and conjunctions instead—even repeatedly. You can be sure that your readers or listeners will like it much better that way.