Infinitive
July 17th, 2006
Sometimes simple questions bother me...
I found out a strange sentence for me in my dictionary when I was looking up the meaning of the word "be willing to". According to the dictionary, it means "prepared to do something, or having no reason to not want to do it". I can understand what it means, but had a little bit strange feeling after looking at the part, "to not want to do it".
In Japan, most English language teachers teach the children of their nation that the negation of "to infinitive(to不定詞 futeishi)" should be written down as "not to do". That's why I felt a little bit strange feeling at that time. After that, I searched out the correct usage of the negation with some search engines on the net - such as Google and Yahoo!, and realized that the form of "to not do" is correct in many cases and the Japanese education is wrong.
I'm so lucky because I could make sense of the correct English grammar thanks to my English-English dictionary.
| English study |
5 comments:
Hi Plow,
Three "old school" English rules are :
1) Do not split the infinitive
Example:
A. to fully understand (X wrong in formal writing according to old school rules.. the infinitive has been split with "fully")
B. to understand fully (better usage because the infinitive is not split)
2) Do not end a sentence with a preposition
Example:
A. whom are you speaking with? (X wrong in formal writing according to old school rules)
B. with whom are you speaking? (better usage because preposition is not at the end of the sentence)
3. Do not use contractions in formal writing
A. you can't do it (X wrong due to contraction)
B. you cannot do it (correct.. no contraction)
However, many people do not follow these rules while writing. You do not need to worry about them for speaking!
Hope that helps.
Hey jd,
That's so nice of you. So helpful! Thank you so much.
I bet you will be able to be an excellent English teacher if you can come to Japan.
I hop you are well.
Great site lots of usefull infomation here.
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Greets to the webmaster of this wonderful site. Keep working. Thank you.
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