Words similar to infinitive
Example sentences for: infinitive
How can you use “infinitive” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:
She understood the meaning of ban; she had apparently heard its inflected past tense form; but the infinitive and the present tense forms were unknown to her.
The numbers in the above sentence indicate the beginning of each phrase and subordinate clause-- (1) adverb clause: “When people who swing want to see what's happening” modifies the verb try in the main clause; (2) adjective clause: “who swing” modifies the noun people ; (3) infinitive phrase: “to see what's happening” acts as the direct object of the verb want ; (4) noun clause: “what's happening” acts as the direct objective of the infinitive “to see”; (5) gerund phrase: “attending parties given by hipsters” acts as the direct object of the verb try ; (6) participial phrase: “given by hipster” modifies the noun parties ; (7) perpositional phrase: “by hipsters” modifies the passive participle given . In subsequent sentences I shall provide numbers but leave the reader to identify the structures, which will appear in varying orders, so as to avoide cluttering the discussion with labyrinthine explanations like this one.
Here Bruce's Brilliant excision of one word is accomplished in his second phrase, the infinitive, in which he lifts out the to : “Helping [to] win by scoring.
A carelessness about inflection in Pepys's day is shown above with the examples of the objective I and who . Rarer back then was the use of whole phrases as single words as, for instance: to quickly and efficiently do this job, where the verb and two adverbs are treated together as a so-called split infinitive marked by to, instead of the prescribed to do this job quickly and efficiently, where only do is the infinitive marked as such by to and modified by two adverbs.
Not everyone can always be sure of everything, but it has always seemed to me that one of the functions of education is to implant doubt in a student's mind: in other words, it is not so important that he remember, a dozen years after leaving school, what a dangling modifier, split infinitive, agreement between the number of a subject and its verb, etc., might mean, but the process of education should have created a (minor) circuit in the brain of the pupil so that when a certain situation is encountered later on, he acknowledge a nagging suspicion that there might be something wrong and that it would be best were he to look it up in an authoritative source to see what is written there by people who know such things.
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