Student Blog

25-Aug-2011 (0 comments)

Gerunds and Infinitives 2

Firstly, my apologies for taking so long to post this. I have been busy elsewhere.

At the end of my first blog on Gerunds and Infinitives, I promised to write another on the use of gerunds and infinitives with verbs of perception and modal verbs. So here goes.

Verbs of perception:

The main difficult here stems from the fact that you can have these verbs followed by either a gerund or what looks like an infinitive.

I saw her go into the shop.

I saw her going into the shop.

Is there a difference in meaning? Well, yes, there is a difference. In the first sentence, you saw the completed action. She entered the shop and you saw the whole thing. In the second sentence, you saw a part of the action; the part where she was going into the shop. It is not as clear-cut that she actually finished up in the shop as it is in the first sentence.

It is easier to see the difference in this example:

I saw him build a model of the Empire State Building out of Lego.

I saw him building a model of the Empire State building out of Lego.

Such a process would take time. In the first sentence, you saw the whole process or you saw the completion of the process. In the second, you saw only a part of the process. He may have finished the model; he may not.

The same goes for ‘hear’.

I heard her talk about her marriage.
I heard her talking about her marriage.

In the second sentence, you heard part of what she has to say on the subject of her marriage; in the first, you heard a completed discourse on the subject. Indeed, in the first sentence, the word talk could be either a verb or a noun, which underlines the fact that what is heard is a finite thing.

There remains the question of whether or not a verb of perception can be followed by an infinitive. In my opinion, it cannot as you cannot perceive a potentiality. That is why the verbs do not have a ‘to’ in front of them. The distinction is between whether you perceived all or part of the event. The fact that it seems to be a question of gerunds and infinitives is a red herring.

Modal Verbs:

As you all know, modal verbs do not behave like other verbs and that is true when it comes to their use with gerunds and infinitives as well. The easiest way to think about them is to see them as ‘superusers’: when you have a modal verb, everything that comes after them is subject to their rules. Now, since modality features on the Potential side of things, they are not going to be followed by gerunds (see my earlier blog on the subject for a discussion of ‘need + gerund’) but because they are different from normal verbs, they are not followed by a real infinitive either. Obviously, if you are using ‘have to’ or ‘ought to’, it looks like there is an infinitive but in fact the ‘to’ is part of the modal verb, not part of the verb that follows. Once you accept this, it is easy to use modal verbs with infinitives. It even helps with the meaning of the modals themselves if you remember that they are always ‘potential’.

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