MASTERING THE USAGE OF THE INDEFINITE PRONOUNS

Grappling with the Grammar of the Indefinite Pronouns
By Jose A. Carillo

I can’t help but wince—sometimes even groan audibly—when an impressive speaker ruins a perfectly fluent speech in English with a hesitant, obviously uncomfortable delivery of a sentence like “Everybody must give his share to this noble undertaking.” Such stumbles show a less than full grasp of the grammar of the indefinite pronouns, which as we are taught early in English should always agree with the number of their antecedent nouns as well as with their gender.

This subject-verb disagreement problem frequently arises when an indefinite pronoun is used as doer or receiver of the action in a sentence with no specific antecedent noun. It’s easy to figure out if an indefinite pronoun is singular or plural, of course, but there’s often no way of knowing beforehand what gender to use for its possessive form. Consider the indefinite pronouns “all” and “somebody” in this sentence, for instance: “All of us [is, are] agreed that this mission must be accomplished, but somebody who has [his, her] personal interests foremost in [his, her] mind must inhibit [himself, herself] from joining it.”

That the verb “are” for the pronoun “all” is clear, of course, but whether to use “his” or “her” as the possessive of the pronoun “somebody,” and whether to use “himself” or “herself” as its reflexive pronoun, are very thorny choices indeed! This ambiguity has given rise to certain conventions—some self-evident and some rather arbitrary—to make sure that the grammar of the indefinite pronouns remains beyond reproach.

Before discussing these conventions, though, we need to review the indefinite pronouns to be doubly sure which are notionally singular, plural, or which can be either singular or plural depending on how they are used.

The definitely singular indefinite pronouns: “another,” “anybody,” “anyone,” “anything,” “each,” “either,” “everybody,” “everyone,” “everything,” “little,” “much,” “neither,” “nobody,” “no one,” “nothing,” “one,” “other,” “somebody,” “someone,” and “something.” Except for three, they take singular possessive pronouns and singular reflexive pronouns; the only problem is that their gender is indeterminate. (The exceptions are “little,” “much,” and “other,” which can be used in more limited ways: “Little is done by people who only talk.” “Much is accomplished through hard work.” “Other than him, who is to blame?”)

The definitely plural indefinite pronouns: “both,” “few,” “many,” “others,” and “several.” All five are no-brainers as to their number: they are plural through and through. Each can take the plural possessive pronoun “their” and the reflexive “themselves,” and we don’t even have to think about gender at all when using them.

The indefinite pronouns that are either singular or plural: “all,” “any,” “more,” “most,” “none,” and “some.” They are singular or plural depending on what they refer to. Singular: “All of that book is pure, unmitigated thrash.” Plural: “The singers are at the studio; all are rehearsing their songs.”

We still have the recurrent dilemma of what gender to use for the singular indefinite possessives. The default usage, of course, is the possessive pronoun “his” when no information is available about the antecedent noun’s gender: “Everybody must give his share to this noble undertaking.” Only in one instance, when the statement refers to a known all-female group, is this default ignored: “Everybody in this women’s league must give her share to this noble undertaking.”

Users of the indefinite possessive have come up with two more options to avoid the male bias in using “him” as default. The first option is to use “his or her,” as in “Everybody must give his or her share to this undertaking.” However, this becomes very awkward with repeated use, so that many writers and speakers take the much better option of reconstructing the entire sentence, using a plural antecedent indefinite pronoun instead to do away with the need to establish gender: “All must give their share to this noble undertaking.”

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This essay first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in the Education Section of the March 9, 2017 issue (print edition only) of The Manila Times, © 2017 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

DEALING WITH THE ENGLISH COMPARATIVES BETTER

Avoid stumbling when using the English comparatives

Who hasn’t stumbled grammatically when comparing things in English, like saying “Less professors than expected have applied to teach in that college of law” or “The public is now showing fewer tolerance for the arrogance of that public official”? Usually, the speaker becomes conscious of the embarrassing error only a few seconds later, but the damage to his or her self-esteem is irreparable. For there’s really no way to justify why those simple comparatives weren’t said correctly off the cuff, the first as “Fewer professors than expected have applied to teach in that college of law,” and the second as “The public is now showing less tolerance for the arrogance of that public official.”

Sizing up and comparing things is one of humankind’s strongest instincts, so it’s really no surprise that every language evolves a well-defined grammar for comparatives. As we all should know by now, English does this in either of two ways:
 

(a) by adding the suffix “-er” to the positive form of an adjective (or adverb), as in “deeper” for “deep,” or

(b) by putting the modifiers “more” or “less” ahead of a polysyllabic adjective derived from a foreign language, as in “more expensive” and “less appetizing.”

To complete the comparative form, English places the subordinating conjunction “than” between the two elements being compared: “The condominium units here are more expensive than those situated in the commercial district.” “This restaurant’s cooking is more (less) appetizing than that of the restaurant in front.” In these comparative constructions, the first element is a clause that expresses the difference (as in “the condominium units here are more expensive”), and the second element is introduced by the subordinating conjunction “than” (“than those situated in the commercial district”).

Always keep in mind though that in two-clause sentences, the following two-part subordinating conjunctions are used instead of “than”:

(a) “as/not as…as,” as in “Our Davao apartelles are as (not as) big as our Tagaytay apartelles”; 

(b) “not so/not as…as,” as in “Her second starring role is not so (not as) sensual as her first”; 

(c) “the same…as,” as in “The weight of his luggage was the same as that in his previous flight”; and (d) “less/more…than,” as in “Their wedding reception cost more (less) than they anticipated.”

Most English speakers quickly get adept at using these comparative forms, but as stated in the outset, the choice between using the comparatives “fewer” and “less” does presents some conceptual difficulty. It requires clearly knowing beforehand whether the noun to be modified by them is countable or noncountable.

Something is countable, of course, when we can figure out without difficulty how many of it there are; we then use “number” as an indefinite measure for it, as in “the number of houses” and the “a number of guests.” On the other hand, something is noncountable if it’s in bulk form and counting its constituent units would be insufferably difficult or impossible; we then use “amount” as a measure for it, as in “the amount of water” and “a great amount of exertion.”

For plural count nouns, or things that use “number” as measure, the comparative “fewer” is used, as in “There are fewer viewers of her provocative blogs now than last week.” However, for singular mass nouns or things that use “amount” as measure,  the comparative “less” is used, as in “Our truck fleet consumed less diesel fuel this week than last week.” We should also take note that when a plural count noun is thought of as an aggregate, “amount” is more appropriate than “number” as a measure for it, as in “You can ship to us any amount of Hawaiian pineapples you can produce.”

With this, we should be better off from now on in avoiding stumbles when using the English comparatives

This essay first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in the Education Section of  the March 16, 2017 issue (print edition only) of The Manila Times, © 2017 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

THE BROADCAST MEDIA AS THE FILIPINOS’ WORST LANGUAGE TEACHER

Our Worst Language Teacher
By Jose A. Carillo

We don’t have to look far to see why Filipinos are having a serious problem learning their Filipino and their English. Taglish, the popular pidgin of Filipino, English, and Spanish, has been the language of choice of the major TV and radio networks for several years now. With this choice, and without meaning to, the Philippine broadcast media have become the most influential but the worst language teachers of the Filipino people. Through their indiscriminate use of Taglish, they have actually been promoting a language that runs roughshod over the form, grammar, and pronunciation of both Filipino and English. They not only hamper and negate the efforts of Filipino-language or English-language teachers in the country, but also undo the progress of even the most capable learners. The major broadcast networks have, in fact, unwittingly made Taglish the default language of the Filipino, there to be heard and seen even without the asking. It should really be no surprise why many language teachers cannot even get their own Filipino and English grammars and pronunciation right, much less teach their pupils and students good Filipino and English.

        IMAGE CREDIT: DWIZ DIGITAL*

It is a terribly lopsided language war in favor of Taglish. When we wake up in the morning, even if we didn’t want to listen, what do we hear from the leading TV and radio networks? Not music to inspire, nor instruction to learn a new thing or two, nor entertainment to start the day right. Instead we get bad news, shallow opinion, and malicious gossip, merrily delivered in Taglish—a Taglish that is getting looser, more audacious, and more pedestrian as the networks fiercely wage their audience-ratings war. Daily we are treated to a sordid spectacle of talk show hosts trying to outshine one another in their off-the-cuff Taglish, flexing the morning news whichever way they wish, and further adding to the Babel by coaxing viewers or listeners to chip in with their own uninformed opinions. 

And this penchant to get uninformed opinion goes to ludicrous extremes: in one network, a gaudily dressed female correspondent chatters nonstop in particularly crude Taglish, runs wild along city streets, clambers up jeepneys, and sashays into wet markets, thrusting microphone onto the mouths of unwitting respondents and forcing them to blurt nonsense on-camera. But not to be outdone, one network features a regular gossip portion hosted by two gays who use pure swardspeak—a breezy, outlandish Taglish—to smear and skewer unnamed movie and TV personalities, government officials, and anybody who takes their fancy. These are, of course, only for the morning wakeuppers. More atrocious Taglish are to come in the TV networks’ noontime variety shows and evening sitcoms.

No amount of formal Filipino and English teaching or linguistic engineering can counter this relentless onslaught on the Filipino’s ears, eyes, tongue, and psyche. Taglish, a language that requires little intellection, offers the line of least resistance to the people. It is all too pat and easy; you can get away with bad thinking and bad grammar and still look intelligent. So why choose the harder road to learning the formal structures and grammar of good Filipino and good English? But give five to ten more years of this Taglish pummeling, and we probably will have a whole new generation of Filipinos totally incapable of speaking and writing in correct Filipino and correct English.

Can we do something about the situation? 

Two countries similarly confronted by the growth of pidgin in their society are fighting it with the language gatekeeping approach. To protect Icelandic from the inroads of English, the government of Iceland has created the Icelandic Language Institute to “immunize” Icelandic from English by coining new native words for English ones. The Singapore government has launched a “Speak Good English Movement” to curb Singlish, its own Pidgin of English, Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin. In a country like the Philippines, however, admirable bureaucratic efforts like these will probably take too long to take off and get things done. The Taglish problem probably needs a more frontal approach.

The general public and the government can take the first crucial step by impressing on the major TV and networks that their role is not simply to mirror society with all its quirks, foibles, and predispositions and to take undue advantage of these in their programming. It also has the obligation to provide their audiences with enough shows and role models for what is good and desirable for the country and its people. They must be made keenly aware that their “mirroring society” model, along with the much-vaunted media freedoms, cannot forever justify the unbridled use of Taglish and “infotainment,” which is often a simplistic, misleading mix of news and uninformed opinion masquerading as public service. In short, the broadcast media, as a social institution strongly imbued with public interest, should serve not only their mercantile interests but the public interest as well—like using good Filipino and good English instead of Taglish for starters.

This essay first appeared in Jose A. Carillo's "English Plain and Simple" column in The Manila Times and subsequently formed Chapter 14 of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Way To Learn Today's Global Language, ©2004 by Jose A.Carillo, ©2008 and Third Updated Edition ©2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*PAGGAMIT NG TAGLISH NA SALITA, TINUTULAN NG KWF 
by DWIZ 882     September 3, 2022

Tutol ang Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF) sa paggamit ng publiko ng Taglish o yung pinagsamang Tagalog at English. Ayon kay Arthur Casanova, Chairman ng KWF, ibang lebel na ang paggamit ng TagLish dahil nasisira nito ang istruktura ng dalawang wika. Nilinaw naman ni Casanova na hindi niya sinasabing huwag gumamit ng English, pero gusto lamang niyang bigyang-diin ang pagpapahalaga sa Wikang Pambansa.

RETROSPECTIVE TO AN ESSAY WRITTEN IN THE EARLY 2000s

Tales of perdition and destruction
BY JOSE A. CARILLO

Our country’s politically disturbing situation today has impelled me to hark back to this cautionary essay that I wrote in the early 2000s bewailing our tendency as a people “to consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but terribly bad decisions that make life so miserable for many of us.”

IN THE engineering discipline there’s this thing they call the strength of materials, or the ability of substances to withstand stress and strain. The maximum stress a material can sustain and still be able to return to its original form is called the elastic limit, and engineers designing structures—bridges and buildings, for instance—savagely subject them to forces beyond their ultimate strengths. For safety’s sake, they have models of the structures “tested to destruction.”

The closest popular expression of this that I can think of is the English idiomatic expression “the last straw that broke the camel’s back.” The allusion is, of course, not only to the danger of overloading beasts of burden but also to the perils of blind, unconditional trust in the capacity of things and people to perform beyond their natural, God-given limits. The folly of such behavior is captured chillingly in this haunting English lullaby familiar to most of us:

Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Down will come baby, cradle, and all.

       IMAGE CREDITS: (LEFT) FLORENCE MARY ANDERSON, PINTEREST.COM,       (RIGHT) PINTEREST.COM)

That humorous English poet-mathematical logician Lewis Carroll (1832-1868) also captured this logic of destruction in the following rhyme about the fallen Humpty Dumpty’s fate in his parable Alice in Wonderland:

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Literature and history are, in fact, replete with accounts of tragedies resulting from a failure to recognize the limits to the strength of materials. For instance, in the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey by the American playwright-novelist Thornton Wilder ((1897-1975), five apparently morally faultless people on religious pilgrimage plunge to their death when a suspension bridge over a deep canyon snaps. Afterwards, a cleric investigates if there was anything bad or evil the victims had done in their lives for them to deserve such apparently senseless deaths.

Little attention was given to the state of the bridging materials and to their possible deterioration over time, nor to the possibility that the victims might have been, say, excessively overweight, that they may have clustered too close to one another at a weak spot, or that they might have gone into such religious frenzies—as in the Mardi Gras or our very own Ati-Atihan—for the bridge to snap in sympathetic vibration. Any of these circumstances might have been “the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” so to speak.

A parallel incident with similar religious overtones happened in Naga City in the Philippines way back in September of 1972. Right after a fluvial procession in honor of the Bicol Region’s religious patroness, Our Lady of Peñafrancia, had passed underneath an old wooden bridge over the Bicol River, the bridge collapsed. Several dozen devotees and onlookers, most of them boys and girls, were crushed to death or drowned.

To my knowledge, no religious investigation was done to connect their tragic fate to possible moral or reprehensible misdeeds in their life, as was done by the cleric who investigated “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” tragedy. However, just a few hours after the Bicol River bridge collapsed, I personally went to the scene and this was what I saw—the wooden rafters and railings were severely rotted, split, or cracked after years of exposure to sun, wind, rain, and termites. To my mind, there was no way the badly decayed wood could have held the weight of those hundreds of people jostling one another in religious frenzy on the bridge or hanging from its rafters. The faith of the devotees was incredibly strong, but the materials of the bridge simply had become so weak for carry their mortal weight.

In shipping as well, even the “battleship quality” steel of the ocean liner RMS Titanic fractured and broke that fateful night on April 14, 1912 when the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, killing over 1,500 passengers aboard. The ship’s hull, although made of what was touted as the best plain carbon ship-plate material available during the time, was damaged by the iceberg, and the rivet heads in the areas of contact simply popped off because of the tremendous forces created by the collision. This caused several seams in the hull to open up, flooding the ship’s watertight compartments. Because of their ductility, the rivets normally should have deformed first before failing, but according to some strength of materials analysts who examined materials from the wreckage many years later, they must have become so brittle in below-freezing water temperature. Their safety factor was thus breached and they failed.

           IMAGE CREDIT: ELITEREADERS.COM

As in these tales of perdition and destruction, the danger to all of us inthe Philippes is that we have been so mercilessly conditioned by our contemporary culture, religion, and media to believe that everything is possible. We hardly put any safety factor in our personal, social, and political affairs. We thrive and even revel in blind faith and wishful thinking. We observe no minimum nor maximum measures, no standards, no limits to anything—be it a dream, a plan, a product, a support system, a mode of conveyance, an advocacy, or a vote or aspiration to an elective post. In sum, we don’t think logically and rationally. We consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.

This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 151 in my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

HOW FINITE VERBS DIFFER FROM NON-FINITE VERBS

When finite verbs take the form of verbals

    IMAGE CREDIT: PINTEREST.COM

Let’s start by reacquainting ourselves with the verbals—the infinitives, the gerunds, and the participles. All three are once-upon verbs transformed by grammatical alchemy into noun forms (in the case of infinitives and gerunds) and adjectives (in the case of participles).

This time, let’s just focus on how verbs are classified in form and function into “finite verbs” and “non-finite verbs.” Precisely what are these two forms and how do they differ?

A verb in its finite form

A verb, as we all know, is a word that serves as the grammatical center of the predicate of a sentence and expresses an act, occurrence, or state of being. It is “finite” if it actually shows tense (past, present, or future), person (first person, second person, or third person), and number (singular or plural).

Here are sentences that use finite verb forms expressing an act or occurrence: “I run.” “He runs.” “We ran.” And here are sentences that use different forms of the linking verb “be” to express a state of being: “I am hungry.” “She was hungry.” “They were hungry.” All of these verbs have duration, meaning that they happen at some point in time, and they change in form—inflect—depending on tense, person, and number. In sum, finite verbs are functioning as “true” verbs.

When a verb assumes non-finite forms

 

     IMAGE CREDIT: PEDIAA.COM

In contrast to finite verbs, a verb becomes non-finite when it assumes a form that has no duration and cannot take tense, person, and number. We can liken non-finite verbs to actions that congealed as they were taking place, as in a freeze-framed scene from a movie. They become what are known in grammar as the verbals. The verb “take,” for instance, can assume the non-finite forms “to take” (infinitive), “taking” (gerund), and “taken” (participle). These three forms no longer function as verbs but serve as nouns or adjectives instead.

Let’s look closer at how these non-finite verbs work.

As an infinitive phrase (noun): “To take her hand would not be advisable.” “I have never wanted to take her place.”

Gerund phrase (noun): “Taking her hand would not be advisable.” “I have never considered taking her place.”

Past or present participle (adjective): “The taken seat was the cause of their quarrel.” “Taking seats without permission is impolite.”
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The above discussions have been excerpted from my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times, July 5, 2004, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

COMPANION READING IN JOSE CARILLO'S ENGLISH FORUM:
"The perfect infinitive and perfect gerund forms and their usage"
https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=6577.0

THE CHOICE BETWEEN GERUNDS, FULL INFINITIVES, OR BARE 1NFINITIVES

Precisely When To Use Gerunds, Full Infinitives, or Bare Infinitives

For many nonnative speakers or learners of English, it’s difficult enough deciding whether to use a gerund or an infinitive for certain sentence constructions, but the problem becomes even more baffling when neither makes the sentence work properly or—at the very least—doesn’t make that sentence sound right. In such cases, in fact, lopping off the “to” from the full infinitive form to yield what’s called the bare infinitive becomes necessary to put the sentence on the right footing.

Such a grammatical dilemma was recently presented to me by an Iran-based English teacher towards the end of 2013, to analyze and resolve which I wrote a three-part essay for my weekly English-usage column in The Manila Times in early 2014. I am now posting all three parts of that column in this Blogspot retrospective for the benefit of everyone who still get similarly stumped by the gerund-infinitive conundrum. 

Part 1 – The choice between the gerund and the infinitive

The English teacher in Iran wrote about getting perplexed by the following sentences involving infinitives and gerunds:

“Please take a look at Sentences 1 and 2 below:

“(1) ‘Rather than drive to New York in the snow, we decided to stay home and watch the game on television.’

“(2) ‘Rather than running away from a difficult situation, they see it as challenging.’

“As you can see, in Sentence 1, after ‘rather than,’ the bare infinitive ‘drive’ is used, while in Sentence 2, an ‘-ing’ form of the verb is used. Why? I’m really confused. What do we need after the ‘rather than’—a bare infinitive or an ‘-ing’ form? How do we decide which one to use?”

I replied to Farhad that the question involves two grammatical aspects: whether to use an infinitive or gerund, and whether to use a full infinitive or bare infinitive.

For a better understanding of these grammatical forms, recall that infinitives and gerunds are both verbals, or words that combine the characteristics of a verb and a noun. As a rule, an infinitive has the form “to + verb stem,” as in “to watch” functioning as a noun, while a gerund is a form of the verb that ends in “-ing,” as in “watching” likewise functioning as a noun. (A third kind of verbal, the participle, combines the characteristics of a verb and an adjective—as in the participle “watched” in the sentence “A watched pot never boils.”)

     IMAGE CREDIT: YOUTUBE.COM VIDEO

Being functionally nouns, both infinitives and gerunds can be used as subject, object, or complement, but whether an infinitive or gerund will properly work as such is primarily determined by the operative verb of the sentence.

Take Sentence 1 above: “Rather than drive to New York in the snow, we decided to stay home and watch the game on television.”

Let’s put that sentence in its normal, straightforward form so we can analyze it better: “We decided to stay home and watch the game on television rather than drive to New York in the snow.” Here, it’s clear that the operative verb is “decided,” and that “to stay home and watch the game on television” and “drive to New York in the snow” are both infinitive phrases serving as its direct objects—meaning that they are acting as nouns receiving the action of the verb “decided.”

The difference between these two infinitive phrases, however, is that the first,  “to stay home and watch the game on television,” is a full infinitive phrase, while the second, “drive to New York in the snow,” is a bare infinitive phrase, having dropped the function word “to.” The sentence is none the worse for it, though, showing that the infinitive “to drive” can take its bare infinitive form in that sentence without messing up its grammar and syntax.

Now let’s see if that sentence will still work correctly if it uses the full infinitive “to drive” instead: “We decided [i]to stay home and watch[/i] the game on television[i] rather than to drive to New York[/i] in the snow.” The grammar and syntax of that sentence remain airtight, but I must hasten to add that this doesn’t hold true in all cases. Indeed, several other factors come into play on whether a full infinitive or bare infinitive will work in a sentence.

Before taking up that aspect, however, let’s find out first if we can replace the infinitive phrases in Sentence 1 with their corresponding gerund forms: “We decided staying home and watching the game on television rather than driving to New York in the snow.” This time the sentence no longer reads and sounds right—clearly indicating that “decide” as operative verb won’t accept gerund phrases as direct objects. 

We will discuss the ground rules for choosing between infinitives and gerunds in Part 2 of this essay below.

Part 2 – Ground rules for choosing between gerunds and infinitives   

Let’s continue our discussion on the choice between infinitives and gerunds and between full infinitives and bare infinitives in constructing sentences. 

In Part 1 of this essay, we left off with the finding that the following sentence that uses infinitive phrases as direct object of the operative verb “decided” is grammatically airtight: “We decided to stay home and watch the game on television rather than to drive to New York in the snow.” However, when the infinitive phrases are replaced by their gerund phrase equivalents, the sentence no longer reads and sounds right: “We decided staying home and watching the game on television rather than driving to New York in the snow.”

The problem is that the verb “decide” won’t accept the gerund phrases as direct objects in that sentence. In English, it is the operative verb that determines whether an infinitive or gerund can serve as subject, object, or complement, and it does so following these four ground rules:  

1. Use the infinitive as subject when denoting potential, the gerund when denoting actuality or fact. Potential: “To win will be great.” (“Winning will be great” works just as well, for “win” is one of those verbs that can take either the gerund or infinitive form to denote potential.) Actuality or fact: “Winning made him ecstatic.” (The infinitive doesn’t work: “To win made him ecstatic.”)

2. Use the infinitive as complement or object when denoting future ideas and plans, the gerund when denoting acts done or ended. Infinitive for future ideas and plans: “Her ambition is to teach.” (But not, “Her ambition is teaching.”) Gerund for acts done or ended: “She picked teaching.” (But not, “She picked to teach.”)

3. Use the infinitive as complement for single or repeated action, the gerund for ongoing action. Single action: “I came here to study.” (But not, “I came here studying.”). Repeated action: “She goes there to rest.” (But not, “She goes there resting.”). Ongoing action: “He does selling on the side.” (But not, “He does to sell on the side.”).

4. Use the infinitive as object for a request, instruction, or causation; the gerund for attitude and unplanned action. Request: “He asked me to rehearse.” (But not, “He asked me rehearsing.”). Instruction: “She told me to wait.” (But not, “She told me waiting.”). Causation: “They forced him to abdicate.” (But not, “They forced him abdicating.”). Attitude: “He thinks sailing is risky.” (But not, “He thinks to sail is risky.”) Unplanned action: “He found dancing to his liking.” (But not, “He found to dance to his liking.”).

These ground rules provide us with a clearer conceptual framework for using infinitives or gerunds, but we must firmly keep in mind that the primary basis for the choice is the operative verb of the sentence. We have to get used to the fact that some operative verbs can take infinitives, others can take gerunds, and the rest can take both. Making the correct choice won’t be easy, but ultimately, it’s the one that makes the sentence read logically and sound right.

Now let’s go back to Sentence 2 as presented by Farhad H.: “Rather than running away from a difficult situation, they see it as challenging.” He asked: Shouldn’t that sentence use the bare infinitive phrase “run away” instead?

That sentence obviously doesn’t read logically or sound right with the gerund phrase “running away,” but neither does it do so with the full infinitive phrase “to run away”: “Rather than to run away from a difficult situation, they see it as challenging.” However, it makes sense and reads perfectly well with the bare infinitive phrase “run away”: “Rather than run away from a difficult situation, they see it as challenging.” Why is that?

In Part 3 below which is the final final part of this discussion, we’ll take up the rules for choosing between full infinitives and bare infinitives.

Part 3 – Grammatical situations that require the bare infinitive 

In Part 2 of this essay, we saw that the following sentence with the full infinitive phrase “to run away” doesn’t sound right: “Rather than to run away from a difficult situation, they see it as challenging.” However, it reads perfectly well when that full infinitive phrase is changed to its bare infinitive form: “Rather than run away from a difficult situation, they see it as challenging.”

So the question is: Are there hard-and-fast rules for using the full infinitive or the bare infinitive? There's actually none; all that can really be said is that in general, the primary determining factor is the operative verb of the sentence. Indeed, we’ll only find out which of them works—or works best—by first using the full infinitive by default. When it doesn’t work, the bare infinitive form usually will—unless, as we saw in our previous discussions, it’s only the infinitive’s gerund equivalent that can do the job.

At this point, we can now categorically answer the original question of Iran-based Forum member Farhad H. that launched this discussion: It’s in the nature of English that when an infinitive or infinitive phrase is preceded by the adverbs “rather,” “better,” and “had better” or by the prepositions “except,” “but,” “save” (in the sense of “except”), and “than,” it’s highly advisable to use the bare infinitive in the sentence.

Let’s try out those specific instances that require the bare infinitive: “We would rather commute than drive at this hour.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “We would rather to commute than to drive at this hour.”) “With the mess you’re in, you had better hire a lawyer.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “With the mess you’re in, you had better to hire a lawyer.”) “We tried everything except beg.” (Iffy with full infinitive: “We tried everything except to beg.”) “They did nothing but complain.” (Iffy with full infinitive: “They did nothing but to complain.”)  

Keep in mind though that as a rule, the verb auxiliaries “shall,” “should,” “will,” “would,” “may,” “might,” “can,” “could,” and “must” should always be followed by a bare infinitive: “I shall scold them.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “I shall to scold them.”) “We may go there tonight.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “We may to go there tonight.”) “You must find her at once.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “You must to find her at once.”)

When the operative verb is a perception verb like “see,” “feel,” “hear,” or “watch” and it’s followed by an object, the object complement should be in the bare infinitive form for the sentence to work properly: “We watched him perform the role and we saw him bungle it so badly.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “We watched him to perform the role and we saw him to bungle it so badly.”) “I heard her scream at a fellow justice during a full session.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “I heard her to scream at a fellow justice during a full session.”)

A bare infinitive is likewise needed as object complement when the operative verb is the helping verb “let” or “make” followed by an object: “Let me call you sweetheart.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “Let me to call you sweetheart.”) “She always makes me feel brand new.” (Faulty with full infinitive: “She always makes me to feel brand new.”)

The helping verb “help” itself, however, can take either a full infinitive or a bare infinitive as object complement. The sentence sounds formal with the full infinitive: “She helped them to mount the coup d’etat.” It’s relaxed, informal-sounding with the bare infinitive: “She helped them mount the coup d’etat.”

Always remember, though, that all of these uses of the bare infinitive should be treated as exceptions to the general rule. When in doubt, use the full infinitive first to see if the sentence will work properly.

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This three-part discussion originally appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times, January 11, 18, and 25, 2014, © 2014 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

GETTING TO KNOW THE PARENTHESIS BETTER

Parenthesis—Not Just That Familiar Pair of Curved Marks in English Exposition But Any Amplifying Material

Part I - Parenthesis is basically added information in a sentence               that isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable

We are all familiar with the two curved marks that we know as the parenthesis ( ), but what some of us may not know is that in English grammar, the parenthesis is actually any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence or passage by some form of punctuation. That punctuation can be those two curved marks (they are called brackets in British grammar), of course, but depending on the importance of the inserted information and the writer’s intention, it can also be a pair of enclosing commas or a pair of enclosing dashes.

Let’s take a look at the following examples:

(1) Parenthesis by comma: (a) “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” (b) “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

(2) Parenthesis by dashes: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.”

(3) Parenthesis by parentheses: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.”

In each of the three examples above, the information set off by the punctuation marks—whether by commas, dashes, or parentheses—is called a parenthetical, and its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains basically added information; however, it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. A parenthetical is basically added information; however, it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. It may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, to establish the logic of the sentence, or to convey a particular tone or mood for the statement. In fact, the punctuation chosen for a parenthetical largely determines its optionality or importance to the statement.

So the big question about parentheticals is really this: Under what circumstances do we use commas, dashes, or parentheses to punctuate or set off a parenthetical from a sentence?

In Example 1(a) above, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” is what’s known as a nonrestrictive relative clause. A nonrestrictive relative clause is a parenthetical that provides information that’s not absolutely needed to understand the sentence; in other words, it is nondefining information. The sentence will remain grammatically and semantically intact without it: “Ferdinand Magellan was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Without the nonrestrictive relative clause, however, the sentence loses a lot of valuable information about its subject, “Ferdinand Magellan”; in fact, the intended context for the statement disappears completely.

For such type of parenthetical, the most appropriate choice of punctuation is a pair of enclosing commas, as was used in the original sentence. It won’t do to punctuate a nonrestrictive relative clause with dashes or parentheses, for either of them would render the information optional, as we can see in these two versions of that sentence: “Ferdinand Magellan—who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521—was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” “Ferdinand Magellan (who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521) was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Both of these sentence constructions run counter to the writer’s original intention.

We must keep in mind, though, that the same parenthetical—“who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521”—would have become a restrictive relative clause had the subject been a generic noun like, say, “the explorer,” in which case the pair of enclosing commas would have been rendered unnecessary: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

Part II - Parenthesis isn’t just optional material or afterthought

In Part I above, I pointed out that if we substitute a generic noun for a proper noun that’s being modified by a nonrestrictive relative clause, the pair of commas enclosing that clause would be rendered unnecessary. Thus, the sentence “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães” takes the following form when its subject is replaced with the generic noun “the explorer”: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The absence of the enclosing commas indicates that the nonrestrictive relative clause has become a restrictive one.

Obviously, the following questions will come to mind when that happens: Why not leave those enclosing commas alone? What difference does it make if we let those commas stay even after changing “Ferdinand Magellan” to “the explorer”?

The reason lies in the basic grammatical difference between a proper noun and a generic noun. We will recall that a proper noun is one that designates a particular being or thing, and that as a rule in English, it is capitalized to indicate this fact. A proper noun, moreover, has this important characteristic: as a rule, it won’t accept a limiting or restrictive relative modifier to define it. By its very name, a proper noun is supposed to have already defined itself, making it one of a kind.

Now, we need to recall at this point that a relative clause or a “who”-parenthetical that comes after a proper noun—“Ferdinand Magellan” in this case—becomes a restrictive clause or limiting modifier when it’s not enclosed by a pair of commas. It is therefore grammatically incorrect for the subject “Ferdinand Magellan” to be followed by a relative clause that’s not enclosed by commas: “Ferdinand Magellan who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” will always need the pair of enclosing commas in such cases: “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

It’s an altogether different thing when we replace a proper noun with a generic noun in such sentence constructions. We will then have two grammatical choices. If our intention is to, say, make “the explorer” specifically refer to “Ferdinand Magellan” and to no other person, then we need to modify it with a restrictive relative clause—one without the enclosing commas, as was done previously: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

On the other hand, if by “the explorer” we mean any explorer at all who had claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown, we would need to modify that generic noun with a nonrestrictive clause or nonlimiting modifier instead: “The explorer, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The enclosing commas indicate that the person referred to isn’t unique; he might not have been Ferdinand Magellan.

Now let’s evaluate the second sentence that I gave in Part I above as an example of parenthesis by comma: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” Here, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” is what is known as the appositive phrase. It is a statement that serves to explain or identify the noun or pronoun that comes before or after it.

The appositive phrase is an extremely useful grammatical device for giving context and texture to what otherwise might be very bland or uninformative sentences. We will discuss it in detail in the Part III. 

NOTE: In the essay above, the italicization of the parenthetical in the sentence given as example is done for emphasis only. Parentheticals are normally written or printed in the same Roman typeface as the rest of the sentence.

Part III - Parenthesis isn’t just optional material or afterthought

We will now discuss the appositive phrase found in the following sentence that I earlier presented for evaluation in Part I: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” The appositive phrase here is, of course, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” It’s an added statement that gives context and texture to this vague, bare-bones sentence: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

On closer scrutiny, we will find that the appositive phrase is actually a simplified form of the nonrestrictive relative clause in this sentence: “Cleopatra, who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” It is, in fact, the relative clause “who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” with both the relative pronoun “who” and the linking verb “was” taken out.

That grammatical streamlining process produces a modifier in noun form—“the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later”—that is in apposition or equivalent to the noun form it modifies—“Cleopatra.” Indeed, appositive phrases are a compact and concise way of describing people, places, and things or of qualifying ideas within the same sentence. They allow us to provide more details about a subject without having to start another sentence—a process that sometimes undesirably slows down the pace of an unfolding exposition or narrative.

The use of appositive phrases, we now will probably recall, is also one of the most efficient ways of combining sentences. It allows a related statement from another sentence to be folded into the sentence that precedes it. The sentence that we are evaluating now, for instance, has combined these two sentences: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire. She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” By making the statement in the second sentence an appositive in the first, we get a sentence that’s richer in texture and more interesting to read: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

Such constructions also have the added virtue of allowing us to develop the basic statement of a sentence unimpeded. Assume that we have already written this basic statement: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” If we use the appositive phrase “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” to form a new sentence after it, that new sentence would often become a stumbling block to developing the basic statement. Indeed, with a powerful statement like “She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” getting in the way, it won’t be an easy task to go back to the thread of our basic statement and develop it. In contrast, folding that powerful statement into an appositive phrase in the first sentence neatly sidesteps the potential continuity problem while making that first sentence much more readable and interesting.

The appositive phrase we have discussed above is of the nonrestrictive type, which means that it isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence even if it adds important additional information to it. Nonrestrictive appositive phrases are parentheticals that, like nonrestrictive relative clauses, need a pair of enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence.

But some appositive phrases are of the restrictive type and they don’t need those commas. We will take them up next in Part IV. 

NOTE: In Part III above, the italicization of the parenthetical in the sentence given as example is done for emphasis only. Parentheticals are normally written or printed in the same Roman typeface as the rest of the sentence.

Part IV - Parenthesis isn’t just optional material or afterthought

We already know that a parenthesis or parenthetical is basically added information whose distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. So far, however, we have taken up only its first two types, the nonrestrictive relative clause and the nonrestrictive appositive phrase, both of which require enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence. We have also taken up the restrictive relative clause and the restrictive appositive phrase, but we have seen that they aren’t really true parentheticals because they are not expendable—we don’t really have the option to drop them from the sentence.

This time we’ll take up the two other kinds of parentheticals: the parenthesis by dashes, and the parenthesis by parentheses. They differ from the parenthesis by comma in that neither of them can be punctuated properly by a pair of enclosing commas. In their case, though, the use of dashes or parentheses is generally interchangeable and is often a matter of stylistic choice. This choice largely depends on whether the parenthetical is really optional or contextually necessary, perhaps simply an aside; in any case, however, using enclosing commas to set it off is out of the question.

Parenthesis by dashes. This kind of parenthetical normally folds another sentence into a sentence, as in this example: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” What sets off the parenthetical “they said they didn’t know it then” from the main sentence is a pair of double dashes, which indicates a much stronger break in the thought or structure of the sentence than what a pair of enclosing commas can provide.

See what happens when we use commas instead to punctuate that kind of parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill, they said they didn’t know it then, but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” The pauses provided by the two commas are much too brief to indicate the sudden shift from the major developing thought to the subordinate idea; structurally, they also truncate the sentence. 

If the writer so chooses, however, parentheses may also be used for that same parenthetical: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill (they said they didn’t know it then) but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.” When parentheses are used, however, the implication is that the writer doesn’t attach as much importance to the qualifying idea as he or she would when using double dashes instead.

Parenthesis by parentheses. This is the preferred punctuation when the writer wants to convey to the reader that the idea in the parenthetical isn’t really crucial to his exposition, as in this example: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.” However, if the writer intends to take up the dealer’s apparently false assurance in some detail later in the exposition, the parenthesis by dashes would be a good foreshadowing device: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan—the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled—busted one of its pistons.”

Parentheticals enclosed by parentheses need not be complete sentences, of course. They can be simple qualifying phrases within or at the tail end of sentences: “Many elective officials (of the dynastic kind, particularly) sometimes forget that they don’t own those positions.” “The disgruntled cashier took the day off (without even filing a leave).”

Even more commonly, parentheses areof used to add a fact—maybe a name or number—that’s subordinate or tangential to the rest of the sentence, as in this example: “Recent geologic research (Alvarez, Alvarez et al, 1980) indicates that the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid some 10 km in diameter smashed on present-day Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago.” 

NOTE: In the essay above, the italicization of the parenthetical in the sentence given as example is done for emphasis only. Parentheticals are normally written or printed in the same Roman typeface as the rest of the sentence.

This intensive four-part discusssion of the parenthesis in English exposition first appeared as a series in my "English Plain and Simple" columns in The Manila Times in December 2009, copyright by the Manila Times Pubishing Corp. All rights reserved.