|
W
HAT A TO-DO
(
OR
, V
ERBS
)
Smart Alec: When somebody greets us with How do you do?, why don’t we
ever reply Do what??
A verb is a ‘doing word’: I do , you go , he runs , we sleep , they sneeze . A verb
also expresses a state of being: I am , it is , we live . Verbs have a lot of clout. They
make things happen.
I books
You grammar
We money
mean nothing without a verb.
I write books
You learn grammar
We earn money
make perfect sense. And are good things. Particularly the last one.
To be or not to be
With verbs, we start with the infinitive , which is made up of the preposition to
and the basic form of the verb:
To be , or not to be , that is the Question.
To sleep , perchance to dream .
To have and to hold .
These verbs have meaning – we know what to be , to sleep , to dream , to have ,
to hold mean – but they don’t tell us anything specific about the action that is
being performed, the time it is (or was or will be or may have been) being done,
or the number of people doing it. For that, we need either:
to conjugate the verb – that is, change the ending to show a change of meaning
(he guffaw s , I guffaw ed ); or
to add an auxiliary or helping verb to specify time and number (I will guffaw ,
you are guffawing , he has guffawed ).
Once you have conjugated a verb and added any auxiliaries you want to make
the action complete, you have a finite verb . (As in, not an infinitive, you see?
Clever, eh?)
To boldly split
But surely, this is a practice entirely unknown to English speakers and
writers. It seems to me that we ever regard the to of the infinitive as
inseparable from its verb. And, when we have already a choice between
two forms of expression, scientifically to illustrate and to illustrate
scientifically , there seems no good reason for flying in the face of common
usage.
H
ENRY
A
LFORD
, Plea for the Queen’s English , 1864
The old rule was simple: never split an infinitive – that is, on pain of death,
never put a word between the to and the rest of the verb. The example everyone
trundles out at this point is Star Trek ’s ‘To boldly go…’
It is, however, probably one of the dafter rules to come out of the old
grammarians’ insistence on applying Latin rules to English: Latin infinitives are
one word – amare , potare , studere – so couldn’t be split anyway. Modern
scholars reckon that splitting an infinitive is perfectly acceptable if the
alternative would be clumsy or ambiguous. In the following sentences, for
example, we think that the non-split version is more elegant and the meaning is
equally clear, so it is preferable. But it is surely preferable because it is more
elegant , not because the infinitive is unsplit.
Many people choose to incorrectly split an infinitive in everyday speech.
Many people incorrectly choose to split an infinitive in everyday speech.
They decided to quickly devour the pie.
They decided to devour the pie quickly .
She put aside extra time to closely mark the exam papers .
She put aside extra time to mark the exam papers closely.
On the other hand, this fragment (from a Daily Telegraph report) scrupulously
avoids splitting the infinitive and in so doing sacrifices clarity: A family doctor
who installed a camera secretly to film a woman using his bathroom… What was
it that was done secretly? The installation or the filming? (Or, given the context,
perhaps both?)
‘The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split
infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4)
those who know and approve; (5) those who know and distinguish… Those who neither know nor
care are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes.’
H. W. F
OWLER
, Modern English Usage , 192 6
A few irregularities
Regular verbs – those that follow the rules – are conjugated as follows:
*22
Present tense:
I love , you love , he love s , we love , they love
Past tense:
I love d , you love d , he love d , we love d , they
love d
Present
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
