Kent,

You're right. "I am going to run" is ambiguous.

The "to run" in the sentence that paraphrases as "I am going (somewhere)
for the purpose of running" has an adverbial infinitive phrase. In the
other interpretation (paraphrase: "I will run"), "be going to" can be
considered a multi-word modal (the modals include will, shall, may, can,
and must). Modals are followed by nonfinite verbs (verbs without any
inflections). Your question then is whether those nonfinite verbs (e.g.,
"sing" in "He may sing tomorrow") can also be called "infinitives" or
whether that term is reserved for nonfinite verbs preceded by "to." 

Any answers out there?

Dick Veit

________________________
 
Richard Veit
Department of English, UNCW
Wilmington, NC 28403-5947
910-962-3324
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kent Johnson
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 1:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: elided infinitives (trying again)

Dick,

Thanks for the reply. By "elided infinitive" (there must be another
term), I don't mean the whole infinitive, but an infinitive with a
missing "to."

Let me ask it this way: In the sentence "I am going to run," is the
"to" different if I mean that I am "on my way" to run, as opposed to my
meaning that I "plan to run" later in the day? Is there a missing,
contentless "to" in either of these sentences--dropped because we don't
use a contentless (as you put it) "to" when the infinitive is preceded
by a meaningful, prepostional "to"?

I know the above is a really strange question, but I'm asking it in the
context of the Spanish grammatical issue I tried to explain in my post
yesterday.

thanks much,

Kent

*

I suppose the infinitive marker "to" could be called a "preposition"
in
the sense that it is in a "pre-position" in relation to a verb, but it
is otherwise quite different from the class of prepositions that
precede
noun phrases.

For one thing, the preposition "to" can be defined in terms of
meaning:
"in the direction toward; reaching as far as, etc." whereas the
infinitive marker "to" is contentless, unparaphrasable, and definable
only in terms of function (a marker that precedes an infinitive). I'd
call the latter "to" its own part of speech, namely an infinitive
marker.

As for elided infinitives, do you mean things like "Mary was elected
treasurer," which could be said to be reduced from "Mary was elected
to
be treasurer"?

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